Singer FKA twigs has filed a lawsuit alleging that Shia LaBeouf was physically and emotionally abusive during their relationship from 2018 to 2019.
She said her experience was part of a pattern of the 34-year-old actor terrorising women.
“Shia LaBeouf hurts women,” the lawsuit filed in Los Angeles Superior Court said in its opening lines. “He uses them. He abuses them, both physically and mentally. He is dangerous.”
FKA twigs — a 32-year-old British singer and actress whose legal name is Tahliah Barnett — alleges in the lawsuit that LaBeouf left her in a constant state of fear and humiliation, once slammed her into a car, tried to strangle her and knowingly gave her a sexually transmitted disease.
In an email to the New York Times, the actor said: “I have no excuses for my alcoholism or aggression, only rationalisations. I have been abusive to myself and everyone around me for years.
“I have a history of hurting the people closest to me. I’m ashamed of that history and am sorry to those I hurt.”
The two met and became a couple after Barnett was cast in Honey Boy, an autobiographical film about LaBeouf’s upbringing as a child actor that portrayed his father as abusive but loving.
Barnett had a supporting role alongside LaBeouf.
After what the lawsuit described as an early “charm offensive”, LaBeouf convinced Barnett to move in with him, leading to what the lawsuit characterised as a “living nightmare”.
LaBeouf isolated FKA twigs from family and friends, demanding absolute loyalty, and constant verbal abuse led to several physical attacks on her, the lawsuit claimed.
He was ferociously jealous of everyone from waiters she was polite with to her ex-fiance, actor Robert Pattinson, the lawsuit alleged.
On a Valentine’s Day getaway in 2019, FKA twigs awoke to LaBeouf choking her and she was paralysed with fear, the lawsuit said.
He later drove wildly and threatened to crash his car if she did not profess eternal love for him, and she feared for her life, the lawsuit claimed.
When she tried to get out of the car and get away from him at a petrol station, he slammed her against the car, tried to strangle her and forced her to get back in, she alleged.
When she was attempting to end the relationship and leave him the following month, he violently grabbed her and lifted her off the ground as she was attempting to depart, according to a housekeeper who witnessed the incident and was cited in the lawsuit.
The lawsuit also alleged that LaBeouf knowingly gave her an unspecified sexually transmitted disease that he went to great lengths to hide from her for much of their relationship, including his use of make-up.
LaBeouf kept guns in the house where they were living and he sometimes slept with them, putting Barnett in a constant state of fear, the lawsuit said.
She is said to have made several attempts to leave him that he resisted, but he later ended the relationship himself.
Karolyn Pho, a stylist who LaBeouf dated in 2010 and 2011, said in the lawsuit that she received similar treatment from LaBeouf — including constant threats and humiliation that sometimes escalated to physical violence.
The lawsuit said Ms Pho allied herself with Barnett in attempt to protect women from LaBeouf, although Ms Pho is not listed as a plaintiff.
LaBeouf told the New York Times that many allegations in the lawsuit and from other women who spoke about him with the newspaper for its report “are not true” but added that he owed the women “the opportunity to air their statements publicly and accept accountability for those things I have done”.
He did not tell the newspaper which allegations he contests.
LaBeouf said he is in recovery and therapy over alcoholism and PTSD, saying he “will forever be sorry to the people that I may have harmed along the way”.
