Jonathan Majors is on a redemption tour. For what, he won't say

NEW YORK (AP) — Throughout the implosion of his once-skyrocketing Hollywood career, from his arrest almost exactly two years ago to his harassment and assault conviction, Jonathan Majors has maintained that he has never struck a woman.

But on Monday, as Majors was in the midst of a comeback attempt and a PR push that returned him to magazine covers, Rolling Stone published an audio recording of a conversation between Majors and Grace Jabbari. Majors was found guilty of one misdemeanor assault charge and one harassment violation for striking Jabbari in the head with an open hand and breaking her middle finger by squeezing it.

“I aggressed you,” Majors acknowledges in the recording, confirming her description of him strangling her and pushing her against a car. The recording appeared to contradict Majors’ previous claims and upend his redemption tour just as his film “Magazine Dreams” opens in theaters Friday.

In an interview with The Associated Press on Wednesday, Majors declined to address the recording, and whether he has assaulted women.

“I can’t answer that,” Majors responded. “I can’t speak to that.”

Majors says he's changed, but not everyone is convinced

Majors, who was sentenced to probation and settled a lawsuit with Jabbari in November, is striving for an unusually swift rebound following a precipitous downfall. Before his March 2023 arrest, Majors was steering toward years of Marvel stardom and a possible Oscar nomination for Elijah Bynum’s “Magazine Dreams,” in which he plays a disturbed aspiring bodybuilder prone to violent outbursts.

Two years later, Majors returns to the public eye with a pledge that he’s changed just months after completing a year of court-ordered domestic violence counseling. At the same time, he's not directly addressing any of the allegations against him — including those from two previous partners, Emma Duncan and Maura Hooper, who in statements submitted pretrial, detailed physically violent and emotionally abusive incidents that bear some similarities to the Jabbari case.

“It’s not something I can talk about legally,” Majors says. “I said to my wife the other day, I’ve changed. I don’t recognize myself. I don’t recognize that guy. I’m in a completely different place. There’s no doubt that I was in turmoil. That guy then didn’t have any tools to deal with things. I don’t know if I liked the guy then. He was accomplished, he was doing great things in certain ways. But I don’t know if I would have hung out with him.”

Majors, who sat for an interview at a Manhattan hotel without a publicist present, spoke reflectively about his experience of the past two years — with the exception of anything specifically related to the conviction, the additional abuse allegations or the women who say he harmed them. Despite never naming a misdeed, Majors says he is reformed.

“I’d say to anyone who cares to listen: I’ve had two years of deep thought and mediation and rumination on myself and my actions, my community, my industry,” he said. “I’m stronger now. I’m wiser now. I’m better now.”

Not everyone is convinced. Hooper, who met Majors at Yale Drama School and dated him from 2013 to 2015, described a traumatizing and controlling relationship. A year after their relationship ended, Majors learned of her having a relationship with someone he knew, she said. According to Hooper's statement, Majors called her and shamed her for having an abortion, which he had encouraged, and told her to kill herself.

“The level of anger that I experienced from this man, I don’t know you exorcise that from your life or your behavior in only 52 weeks,” Hooper told the AP. “People go to therapy for years. I went to therapy for years after Jonathan Majors just to get my mind back.”

Hooper and Duncan's statements were ultimately not allowed as evidence during the trial, but they remain public record. Attorneys for Majors have denied some of their claims, describing both relationships as “toxic.”

Duncan, who dated and was engaged to Majors from 2015 to 2019, described at least eight physical or threatening encounters in her statement. During an argument in 2016 while driving in Chautauqua, New York, he threatened to strangle and kill her, she said. At a spa in Santa Fe, New Mexico, she discovered text messages between Majors and another woman and began packing to leave. He pushed her into couch and began choking her while saying he was going to kill her, Duncan said. (She didn't respond to an email from the AP seeking comment. Attorneys for Jabbari also didn't respond to emails.)

“There is a documented history of 10 years of abuse of women where he calls women ‘sluts,’ he calls us ‘fat whores,’ he tells us to kill ourselves,” Hooper says. “When I hear people say, ‘Come on, how come he can’t come back into the fold?’ I don’t know that those people have read this or understand that we’re talking about a pattern.”

Another test of #MeToo in Hollywood

A changed political climate and several recent cases, including the overturning of Harvey Weinstein’s New York sexual assault conviction, have suggested Hollywood has entered a new chapter in the #MeToo movement. Majors' attempted comeback is one of the most conspicuous tests to the fraying curbs of cancellation and #MeToo vindication.

“We’re suffering a period of tremendous political retrenchment and backlash in this movement,” says Debra Katz, the civil rights attorney who represented Christine Blasey Ford, accuser of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, along with Weinstein accusers. “Much of what we’ve fought for seems to be on the line.”

But women are still coming forward, and Katz believes companies and industries will hold the accused accountable. For his part, Majors, who was dropped from all projects following his conviction, has no new films announced. “Magazine Dreams,” which debuted at the 2023 Sundance Film Festival before his arrest and was subsequently dropped by Searchlight Pictures, is being released by Briarcliff Entertainment, the indie distributor of “The Apprentice.”

“Jonathan made a mistake. There was due process. Justice was served. And then we move on, which I think is generally how we like to think this country operates,” Tom Ortenberg, chief executive of Briarcliff, said Thursday. “We’re faced with two choices: Should ‘Magazine Dreams’ be allowed to be seen? Or should we burn the negative?”

Numerous A-listers, including Michael B. Jordan and Matthew McConaughey, have advocated for Majors’ return to Hollywood. Still, Katz believes Majors’ comeback will ultimately sputter because it hasn’t gone beyond the strategy of what she describes as “get a good PR firm and show my soft side.”

“I think he’s going to suffer a significant comeuppance,” says Katz. “He hasn’t owned up to the behavior. He hasn’t apologized. The only thing he appears to be sorry about is that he got caught.”

Majors' past, and where he goes next

For Majors, his self-examination has focused more on an earlier experience he suggests was at the root of what he calls his turmoil.

“There was a lot of trauma that was piled up and ignored. The best way to describe it is it as an energy that unfortunately was there,” says Majors. “I was feeding the wrong wolf. And that wolf became unignorable. And I was really good at moving fast and outrunning the rabid wolf of trauma. The best thing that could have happened to me — not to my career but to me — was to have to face it.”

Majors, who was raised by his pastor mother in Texas after his father left, says from the age of 9 to about 13, he was the victim of multiple incidents of sexual abuse, from, he says, “two male family members and my sisters’ friends who were older than me — they were older than her.”

“It felt like kids being kids and then it became something different very quickly,” Majors says. “And then it became a pattern.”

Majors only recently began wrestling with this past, he says, working through it in therapy and in conversations with his family. A phone call with his sister, he says, reawakened memories.

“It was an experience that I just killed in my head,” Majors says, tearing up.

“It’s not a boo-hoo-bro, so-sad-for-you situation,” he says, wiping away tears. “It’s life. It’s the hand you’re dealt, and I didn’t know how to play those cards. I’m learning how to play those cards.”

Now, Majors says, he’s never been happier. On Tuesday, he and Meagan Good were wed in a small, impromptu ceremony in Los Angeles officiated by his mother. “We called the family and said, ‘Hey, jump on FaceTime,’” he says, calling it the best day of his life.

“Magazine Dreams,” he thought, would never see the light of day. Now, though, he’s hopeful he can act again.

“I now understand that acting is in many ways my ministry. It’s in many ways my calling,” Majors says. “If it’s not, I’m waiting for someone to tell me it’s not. I’m waiting for God to tell me it’s not. He’s not said that.”