Mr. Majors, an actor, is accused of attacking an ex-girlfriend, a charge that threatens his career as a superhero film star. Lawyers made closing arguments in his case Thursday.
A lawyer for the actor Jonathan Majors in her closing argument at trial on Thursday attacked an ex-girlfriend who has accused Mr. Majors of assault, calling her a liar who had injured herself, but pinned the blame on her boyfriend to punish him for straying.
A prosecutor countered that Mr. Majors had been an abusive boyfriend and that the evidence bore out the accusations: The actor had assaulted and harassed his girlfriend, Grace Jabbari, as they rode in a hired S.U.V. in March.
The competing closings presented a contrast in both substance and style, as Mr. Majors’s lawyer, Priya Chaudhry, used photographs, video and a carefully written summation to sully Ms. Jabbari and argue for Mr. Majors’s innocence.
“It’s hard to keep your story straight when you’re making it up as you go,” Ms. Chaudhry said, before providing a laundry list of what she said were Ms. Jabbari’s contradictions.
The prosecutor, Kelli Galaway, was methodical and less performative, running down evidence that she said proved that Ms. Majors assaulted his girlfriend. She said that Ms. Jabbari had been a reluctant witness, but a convincing one.
“This is not a revenge plot to ruin the defendant’s life or his career,” she said.
On Thursday afternoon, the judge read the jurors their instructions, in advance of deliberations.
Mr. Majors and Ms. Jabbari each have accused the other of assault as they were heading to their shared home early on March 25. The altercation began when Ms. Jabbari saw Mr. Majors receive a flirtatious text message.
On her first day of testimony last week, Ms. Jabbari said that she had grabbed the phone from his hand. First, she said, he tried to pry her fingers away, then he twisted her hand and arm.
“Next,” she said, “I felt like a really hard blow across my head.”
The defense has argued that Ms. Jabbari flew into a rage and attacked Mr. Majors, and Ms. Chaudhry spent much of her closing argument impugning Ms. Jabbari’s credibility, imploring jurors not to believe her “pretty little lies.”
The actor’s harshest possible punishment would be a year in prison if he is found guilty, but he would be more likely to receive probation. However, a guilty verdict could further jeopardize his career, which was frozen in place by the charges.
Mr. Majors was expected to anchor Marvel’s next round of superhero movies, and was awaiting the wide release of a buzzed about star vehicle, “Magazine Dreams,” which has now been put on hold.
The proceedings, thus far, have not rescued his reputation. Instead, embarrassing evidence has emerged, including an audio recording that Ms. Jabbari said she made in which Mr. Majors directed her to treat him like Michelle Obama and Coretta Scott King had treated their husbands.
Prosecutors also introduced a text exchange, in which Mr. Majors urged Ms. Jabbari not to seek treatment for a head wound and threatened suicide if she did, that appeared to reinforce their argument that Mr. Majors had been manipulative and abusive.
Mr. Majors’s lawyers have banked on persuading the jury otherwise — that Mr. Majors cared deeply about Ms. Jabbari and took steps to protect her even after she attacked him.
In Ms. Chaudhry’s closing argument, she repeated “If you believe Grace” over and over, before pointing out seeming contradictions in Ms. Jabbari’s story, including that she partied with strangers and used her injured finger freely after the encounter and that the laceration behind her ear had not left any trace of blood.
“Where is the blood?” Ms. Chaudhry said, adding, “How are they going to explain the utter absence of blood from a head wound that would immediately have turned Grace’s shirt into a crime scene?”
At one point, she said that Ms. Jabbari’s account of the episode would have required Mr. Majors to have arms like “Inspector Gadget” in order to stretch across the S.U.V.’s seat to assault her.
Toward the end of her closing, Ms. Chaudhry argued that Mr. Majors — who called the police himself — had entered what she characterized as a “nightmare.” She punctuated her comment with a sob.
“His fear of what happens when a Black man in America calls 911 came true,” she said. “And now we are here.”
Ms. Galaway was less emotive. She asked jurors to use common sense and reminded them that victims of abuse can react in unexpected ways. Ms. Jabbari’s having gone clubbing after the altercation was not at issue, she said. What mattered was what happened in the S.U.V.
She also insisted that Ms. Jabbari could not have lied, reminding the jurors that a woman to whom Ms. Jabbari had not spoken since March had corroborated her testimony.
“She would not be able to fabricate this story,” Ms. Galaway said of Ms. Jabbari, adding that she would have had to be a “criminal mastermind” to have done so.
Ms. Galaway said that Mr. Majors had been abusive throughout their two-year relationship and that the assault was the natural culmination of his controlling tendencies. She said that he had slowly taken over Ms. Jabbari’s world, cutting her off from friends and family.
The case rested on four simple words, she told the jury: “control, domination, manipulation and abuse.”
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