Something that always bothered me about the Jonathan Majors trial
So something I am curious about with the response/reaction to the Jonathan Majors trial and I am curious where I might be wrong.
I never trusted the trial. but then again, I also know he might well be guilty of assaulting his ex-girlfriend Grace Jabbari. What always bothered me was the difference in how Jonathan Majors got treated compared to someone like Shia LaBeouf or Ezra Miller.
Shia has openly admitted to the fact that he had inner demons that he is struggling with and that he was abusive to his ex-girlfriend. He never really got "cancelled" by Hollywood (whether or not he deserved to be cancelled is another story) and he never faced a trial as far as I can tell.
Ezra Miller has had a laundry list of scandals and controversy and was apparently caught on camera assaulting people. No real publicized trial or anything (not that I think a publicized trial is good but it's what happened to Jonathan Majors). and I feel like social media didn't really come for Ezra like how it did for Jonathan Majors (again, I don't think social media should come for either individual but the difference in how they were treated seemed weird to me). I am not sure if Ezra has been "cancelled" by Hollywood. They hasn't really been in anything, so it might be Hollywood cancelling them or just not willing to take a chance on them or they're focusing on themself.
All three man apparently assaulted other people. One of them on camera, but only the black guy faced a very publicized trial over it. What's more, Majors was accused of assaulting a white woman so it made me feel like the odds were stacked against him even more with regards to getting a fair trail due to the racial undertones.
I will admit, I am not totally plugged into social media (I had no idea about the 6 7 meme until it made an appearance on South Park), I try to avoid staying away from it as I find it toxic to mental health (the extent to which YouTube shoved the Johnny Depp Amber Heard trail down my throat even though I didn't search for it and had no interest in seeing a women being served up on a platter for all the misogynists online who were damn near ready to say she was basically the anti-Christ scared me) but it just felt to me like there was much more furor behind the Majors trail than Miller or LaBeouf and it always made me distrust the pronouncement of guilty even though I also know he might well be actually guilty of assaulting his ex-gf.
Did I misread the situation?
Shia LaBeouf is really not relevant anymore. 2019 was the last time he was relevant in the industry with the release the indie The Peanut Butter Falcon and Honey Boy (which he wrote). By the time his allegations came out from FKA Twigs he wasn’t really working on high profile productions. He then got relegated to productions not in Hollywood, Megalopolis being the biggest one because Coppola specifically wanted to cast “cancelled” actors (Coppola regretted this as Leabouf was a pain on set).
Miller was already controversial prior to The Flash starting production (there’s a video of him chocking a woman in 2020). But by the time the more serious accusations against him came out, The Flash’s productions was largely completed. There wasn’t much the studio could do, and they weren’t going to sink in money into a film that was part of a franchise that was getting rebooted anyway. The only high profile project that Miller has lined up is a film from Lynne Ramsay, which is also a non-Hollywood production and Ramsay worked with Miller early in his career with We Need To Talk About Kevin.
Why it seems like Majors’s situation had more severe consequences: he was set to be the big bad in one of the biggest franchise’s in the world. That’s a big job that he got fired on, similar to Depp getting fired from Fantastic Beasts but frankly a lot bigger. I think this is a case that, yes the optics of keeping Major weren’t great, but it also gave them an excuse to start over since their trajectory at that point was on a downward spiral.
i think I am actually less focused on their job prospects and what I am more focused on is (1) the legal ramifications they faced and (2) the reaction to their legal ramifications on social media/reddit.
I can’t say I followed their legal stuff, which did happen for Miller but I don’t know if LaBoeuf ever had legal issues for that.
Social media reactions to Miller was definitely very strong. A lot of people demanding Warner Bros to reshoot the film to take out Miller, at some point Miller was a meme as like an insane person.
LaBeouf’s social media reactions were not that strong, for sure. But I don’t think they were quiet either.
that's also my issue and makes my post rather paradoxical tbh. I make it a point to not follow these kinds of trial (I think its perverse that these kinds of trials are ever public attention tbh) and only get a bird's eye view just if a post about it hits the front page of reddit which I sometimes scroll while taking a break at work so I am not even reliable when it comes to their legal and social media backlash tbh.
I just felt like Majors got dragged alot more in the media and had a much more publicized and scrutinized trial.
Yea, that's the thing, all 3 certainly got predictably dragged on social media. I just got the impression Majors got dragged alot more.
I don't know enough about the trial to talk about that aspect, but I really do think a major part of Majors getting dragged by media was the fact he was cast as Kang when everything went down. The trial didn't just affect his own career, it impacted plans for the entire Marvel Cinematic Universe. Which, as a reminder, was quite possibly the biggest movie franchise at the time. He was set to be Marvel's next big villain, so changing plans wasn't exactly trivial like when some TV shows or movie franchises write out a character due to issues with the actor.
So that automatically brought him a LOT more scrutiny than the others, both from professional media and from social media. I don't keep up with celebrity news (I don't think I'd even heard about Shia Labeauf), but the sheer scale of the impact from Kang's actor being caught up in the trial came up in any geek-adjacent space because again, Marvel is a MASSIVE franchise. I honestly don't know if his case would have gotten nearly as much publicity and attention if he wasn't cast in that role.
Him being black may have had an impact (who am I kidding, racists definitely jumped on it), but he was in a position that would've gotten tons of scrutiny compared to the others no matter his skin color.
Playing around with Google trends a bit, it looks like "Johnny Depp trial," at the peak, was more searched than "Jonathan majors trial," at the peak, by a factor of 99 to 1. And the Depp trial was more tawdry, but much less legally or commercially significant. So honestly, I'm not sure there's a single reason, per se. I think the most reasonable explanation is probably virality. It picked up a bit, so people started talking about it more trying to get clicks, which led to more people talking about it, and so on.
Domestic abuse cases often aren't tried, because it's difficult for the prosecution to produce hard evidence. Domestic abuse usually occurs behind closed doors, and is a he said, she said case with some circumstanstial evidence.
To back up more, there's a difference between a civil case and a criminal case. A criminal case is always pursued by a prosecutor hired by the state. The bar for a criminal case is substantially higher; the court must be 99% sure the defendant is guilty to render a guilty verdict. If the court is merely 95% sure that they committed a crime, that's supposed to be an innocent verdict. Meanwhile, in a civil case, the court merely needs to be 51% sure the plaintiff is on the wrong. That's why many domestic abuse cases are not pursued by prosecutors, and instead the victim tries in civil court.
The reason why Majors would be arrested and tried and not the others would be the evidence the prosecution had. For Majors, he committed his domestic abuse in the Chelsea district of Manhattan (which, if you don't know, is a very active part of America's largest city), and it was caught on security footage. Can't get much harder than that. When corroborated by pictures of injuries as well as bodycam footage from a prior 911 call, that's a strong case.
And indeed, he was convicted of reckless assault and harassment by a jury of his peers.
I guess, to summarize, the default is that domestic abuse cases don't have enough evidence to meet the standard for criminal court. Majors did his domestic abuse in public, and was caught on security footage. That's the difference.
I have to assume because there's less repercussions for the perpetrator if they are found guilty in a civil trial?
So how come Miller didn't face a trial for the choking incident that apparently surfaced on social media?
Jurisdiction. It would be Iceland’s court that would have jurisdiction over that case. I assume Miller left and never looked back.
That being said, he did get tried and convicted in Hawaii for assault, so it’s not like prosecutors are afraid to charge him.
Liable, not guilty. OJ Simpson was found not guilty for the murders but was found liable. The consequences were financial instead of prison.
Ezra Miller and Shia Laboeuf are pretty shitty people, and they are violent, but Jonathan Majors damn near murdered that girl. He literally strangled her unconscious before calling 911 to save her life.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Majors
You don’t see a difference in severity in these cases? He was arrested on charges of strangulation and she was in fact unconscious with neck injuries. That to me seems substantially worse than anything the others did.
The outcome of the trial seems irrelevant to your question about the public interest because the public interest is based on the lead up to the trial and evidence we know about before the trial. What we had to go on prior to the trial is Jonathan Majors was potentially an attempted murderer.
Jonathan Majors is Black. The other two aren't.
It may not be THE factor, but it is a factor, and I'd argue a big one.