FKA twigs, the musician born Tahliah Debrett Barnett, filed a lawsuit on Friday against her ex-boyfriend Shia LaBeouf, accusing him of “relentless abuse” that included sexual battery, assault, the infliction of emotional distress, and knowingly giving her a sexually transmitted disease.
At the core of the lawsuit, filed in Los Angeles Superior Court and first reported by The New York Times, is an incident that allegedly took place between herself and the actor after a trip to the desert outside of Los Angeles just after Valentine’s Day in 2019. According to the lawsuit, LaBeouf was driving erratically on their way back to the city and threatened to crash the car unless Barnett said she loved him. During that trip, the singer also claims that he “raged at her” the entire time, the Times reports, and once woke her up in the middle of the night choking her. According to the suit, when she begged to be let out of the vehicle, LaBeouf pulled into a gas station and let her get her bags only to then follow and assault her, throwing her against the car and screaming in her face. She also claims he would squeeze or grab her to the point of bruising and kept a loaded firearm by the bed. The musician came to see escaping him as “both difficult and dangerous,” the lawsuit states.
In an interview with the Times, Barnett says she wanted to come forward with her story in part to explain how someone as high-profile as she is could be caught up in that type of relationship dynamic. “I’d like to be able to raise awareness on the tactics that abusers use to control you and take away your agency,” she said. “The whole time I was with him, I could have bought myself a business-flight plane ticket back to my four-story townhouse in Hackney. He brought me so low, below myself, that the idea of leaving him and having to work myself back up just seemed impossible.” She added that she didn’t go to the police at the time “out of a misguided concern about harming his career,” and then later because she assumed she would not be taken seriously. “What I went through with Shia was the worst thing I’ve ever been through in the whole of my life,” she said. “I don’t think people would ever think that it would happen to me. But I think that’s the thing. It can happen to anybody.”
Another of LaBeouf’s ex-girlfriends, stylist Karolyn Pho, told the Times about similarly violent experiences she had had with the actor, some of which are also included in the lawsuit. In one such incident, Pho claims he drunkenly pinned her to a bed and then headbutted her hard enough to draw blood. “So much goes into breaking down a man or woman to make them okay with a certain kind of treatment,” she told the outlet.
In response to the allegations from both Barnett and Pho, LaBeouf wrote in an email, “I’m not in any position to tell anyone how my behavior made them feel. I have no excuses for my alcoholism or aggression, only rationalizations. 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. There is nothing else I can really say.” He added, however, that while he’s “a sober member of a 12-step program…I am not cured of my PTSD and alcoholism, but I am committed to doing what I need to do to recover, and I will forever be sorry to the people that I may have harmed along the way.”
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