Jonathan Majors’ ex-girlfriends detail abuse in New York Times interview
Actresses Emma Duncan and Maura Hooper both claimed to have experienced the hot and cold tendencies of whom they described as a domineering and violent partner.
Two ex-girlfriends of Jonathan Majors say he abused them, accusations that come as the actor awaits sentencing for harassment and misdemeanor assault of another former girlfriend, Grace Jabbari.
According to The New York Times, actresses Emma Duncan and Maura Hooper, who dated Majors before his rise to fame as the Marvel superhero Kang, described him as a controlling and intimidating person who kept them apart from friends and professional endeavors.
The Times said it spoke to more than 20 people and examined pretrial statements in the Jabbari case.
Majors and Duncan met at a summer stock program in New York and were engaged from 2015 until 2019, the Times reported. Hooper was Majors’ classmate at the esteemed Yale School of Drama, dating from 2013 to 2015.
While they were initially unaware that their relationships with the actor temporarily overlapped, they both claimed to have experienced the hot and cold tendencies of the actor, whom they described as a domineering and violent partner.
The women claimed that he showered them both with attention and what they perceived as romantic gestures at the start of their relationships, such as rapidly referring to them as “Mrs. Majors,” conduct they now know was love bombing. “You feel like, ‘Oh, I’m being loved,’ at first,” Duncan told the Times. “And then you feel, ‘I’m being erased.'”
Duncan accused Majors of emotional and physical abuse, which allegedly included choking her, throwing her around, bruising her, and threatening to “strangle and kill her,” according to the pre-trial statement the Times reviewed.
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Hooper said Majors showed her immediate signs of genuine love when they started dating, but he also turned controlling, telling her what to do, who to hang out with, and where to go. According to the pretrial statement for his recent assault case, she was “not allowed to speak to anyone about their relationship, isolating her from a support system.”
Hooper became pregnant soon after she and Majors started dating. In the statement, she claimed Majors pushed her to get an abortion sooner than planned and dropped her off at the clinic. (Majors has denied asking to move up the abortion, according to his lawyers, as reported by the New York Times.) Hooper said she was left to walk home on her own after the procedure as Majors went to a rehearsal for a show they were both working on.
According to her testimony, in 2015, Majors threatened to take his own life when Hooper confronted him with proof that he was having an affair. Hooper said a year after their breakup and when Majors found out she had a brief relationship with someone he knew, he called her a “whore” and insulted her, telling her to commit suicide and threatening to “rip you out of my heart the way they ripped our baby out of you.”
On Thursday afternoon, Priya Chaudhry, a lawyer for Majors, denied claims he physically abused Duncan. She described to the Times the relationships with both women as “toxic” and asserted that her client was taking responsibility for his role.
Duncan, however, likened secrecy to shame and said coming forward with the allegations against the actor allowed her and others in the same situation to find support and recovery.
“I believe in redemption,” said Duncan, The Times reported. “But not without accountability.”
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