Jonathan Majors, the actor who portrays the villainous Kang in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, was arrested and charged in New York City this weekend after an alleged domestic dispute. TMZ first reported the news.
Police responded to a 911 call Saturday morning and found a 30-year-old woman who appeared to have been assaulted. The woman said Majors struck her “about the face with an open hand, causing substantial pain and a laceration behind her ear,” a criminal complaint obtained by ABC News says. Upon arriving on the scene, the police saw the injured woman and arrested Majors.
Later in the day, the actor appeared in court and was charged with two misdemeanour counts of third-degree assault, second-degree aggravated harassment, second-degree harassment and third-degree attempted assault. He was released with the next court appearance scheduled for May 8.
“He has done nothing wrong,” a spokesperson for Majors said in a statement. “We look forward to clearing his name and clearing this up.”
The arrest and charges come at a time when Majors’ fame is at an all-time high. After first gaining national recognition from his work on the HBO show Lovecraft Country and the film The Last Black Man in San Francisco, Majors began to get cast in larger films, several of which hit theatres in early 2023. There was the sequel Creed III where he played a childhood friend turned rival to the title character, as well as Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, where he played Kang, a character who is planned to carry through the next several years of Marvel storytelling.
No word yet if the arrest and charges will change any of that specifically but Majors had been featured in ads for the U.S. Army, which chose to pull those after the events. “While Mr. Majors is innocent until proven guilty, prudence dictates that we pull our ads until the investigation into these allegations is complete,” the Army Enterprise Marketing Office said in a statement to CNN.