Jonathan Majors’ sentencing has been postponed until April 8, according to Deadline. Majors was convicted of reckless assault and harassment in December, and was supposed to be sentenced on Tuesday. Instead, his legal team filed a motion to set aside the verdict. Prosecutors from the District Attorney’s office have a month to respond to the defense, while the judge said he’d make a ruling on the motion by April 1, ahead of the final sentencing.
When his sentencing does occur, Majors faces up to a year in prison, though as a first-time offender, he’s probably more likely to end up with probation. What’s less likely is that he’ll be able to stage a Hollywood comeback, at least in the immediate aftermath of the trial. He’s already been dropped from his major roles (as Marvel villain Kang the Conqueror and a Dennis Rodman biopic), and the pre-sentencing interview with ABC News didn’t help matters. In fact, Hollywood PR experts described the interview as a “really bad mistake” in a new piece from The Los Angeles Times.
“That interview tremendously undercut his credibility,” said Nathan Miller, founder of the crisis management firm Miller Ink. “There’s ways of denying you committed physical assault but also acknowledging the complexities of the situation that shows responsibility. The public doesn’t like it when they think someone is being evasive and makes themselves a victim.”
In particular, online critics and PR experts alike have questioned Majors’ insistence on comparing himself to Martin Luther King Jr. Damning recordings were played in court in which Majors called himself a “great man” to his accuser, ex Grace Jabbari, and insisted she needed to be more like Coretta Scott King or Michelle Obama. In his ABC News interview, the actor doubled down, defending his choice to ask that of Jabbari and even going so far as to say his current girlfriend, Meagan Good, is akin to Coretta. The comparison “suggests just how out of touch he is with what is happening to him at this moment,” Mark Anthony Neal, chair of the African and African American studies department at Duke University, told The L.A. Times.
“If his people thought they could create a shift in his public image, they miscalculated,” said entertainment manager and publicist Ramon Hervey II. “They created another situation where he could be judged, prosecuted and assessed. He didn’t deliver what he intended.”