Last February, Shia LaBeouf allowed visitors at a Los Angeles art exhibition to enter a private room with him and do whatever they wanted while he kept his reactions to a minimum. Now he says one woman raped him during her time in the room.
“One woman who came with her boyfriend, who was out side [sic] the door when this happened, whipped my legs for 10 minutes and then striped my clothing and proceeded to rape me,” Shia said in an email interview with Dazed and Confused. “Then walked out with her lipstick smudged to her awaiting boyfriend who i image was quite hurt by it… All this happened in front of hundreds of people… Yea it was no good. Not just for me but her man as well.”
Shia during the #IAMSORRY show.
The Fury star added the incident occurred on Valentine’s Day and word of it quickly spread to his girlfriend, Mia Goth, who was waiting outside.
“So it really hurt her as well as i guess the news of it traveled through the line,” she said. “She was only about 25 people back when she came in she asked for an explanation and i couldn’t speak so we both sat with this unexplained trauma silently. It was painful. The hardest part of the show.”
Less traumatic but still “terrible” were the times when other visitors would “Take my bag off, pop off a selfie and bounce,” Shia said. Still, he said the overall experience was rewarding. He explained, “I went from being a celebrity or object to a fellow human. I was genuinely remorseful. It wasn’t manipulation, I was heartbroken. People I’ve never met before came
in and loved on me and with me. Some would hold my hand and cry with me, some would tell me to ‘figure it out’ or to ‘be a man’.
I’ve never experienced love like
that; empathy, humanity.”
