What We Know About FKA Twigs and Shia LaBeouf’s Legal Battle
Four years after she sued her ex-boyfriend for alleged physical and sexual abuse, the case is finally heading to trial this fall.
Four years after FKA Twigs filed a lawsuit against her ex-boyfriend Shia LaBeouf for alleged physical and sexual abuse, the case is finally headed to trial this fall. Twigs, legal name Tahliah Debrett Barnett, and LaBeouf started dating after meeting on the set of LaBeouf’s semi-autobiographical film Honey Boy in 2018 and broke up nine months later. In December 2020, Barnett filed a lawsuit accusing LaBeouf of “relentless abuse” spanning sexual battery, physical assault, and emotional distress. “What I went through with Shia was the worst thing I’ve ever been through in the whole of my life,” she told the New York Times in an interview after the filing, which included abuse allegations from another of LaBeouf’s exes.
After the suit was filed, LaBeouf offered a convoluted response. “I have no excuses for my alcoholism or aggression, only rationalizations,” the actor wrote in a statement emailed to the Times in 2020. “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.” Not long after, he reversed course through his legal team, denying “generally and specifically, each and every allegation” in Barnett’s suit.
Now, as the October 14 trial date approaches, LaBeouf’s team is seeking Barnett’s private medical and financial records in an attempt to throw out her claims of emotional distress. Barnett “has alleged severe emotional distress, but she has been thriving emotionally and physically as she has been working on numerous projects and making millions,” read the June filing. “Contrary to what [Barnett] alleges, she appears to have increased her profile in the years after her relationship with Shia.” Barnett’s team, meanwhile, has denounced the efforts as an “invasion of privacy.”
Below is everything we know so far.
In her lawsuit, FKA Twigs says LaBeouf kept a loaded firearm next to their bed and made her watch documentaries about murdered women.
In her 2020 lawsuit, Barnett said LaBeouf’s “relentless abuse” began as verbal harassment and escalated into physical violence. Shortly after the two wrapped work on Honey Boy, Barnett said, LaBeouf convinced her to move in with him and gained her trust and confidence. Things quickly soured. According to the suit, LaBeouf belittled and berated Barnett over “the slightest perceived ‘insult’’’ and subjected her to a “continuous stream of verbal and mental abuse,” from blowing up at her for kissing men on the cheek in music videos and being polite to male waiters to raging at her for hours over disagreements about taste in art. According to the suit, LaBeouf counted the number of kisses Barnett would give him in a day and punished her if she fell short of a certain number. Barnett claims LaBeouf kept firearms throughout the house, including a loaded one next to the bed; in a “constant state of fear,” Barnett said, she was afraid to wake up and go to the bathroom at night in case LaBeouf mistook her for an intruder. She also alleged he made her sleep naked and demanded she join him to watch documentaries about murdered women.
Twigs and another ex-girlfriend accused LaBeouf of physical abuse.
Barnett said LaBeouf’s abuse turned physical on multiple occasions, leaving her with numerous injuries. A particularly egregious instance allegedly took place on a drive from the desert back to Los Angeles in 2019. Barnett said LaBeouf took off his seat belt, drove recklessly, and threatened to crash if she didn’t profess her love for him. At a gas station, Barnett said she begged to be let out but LaBeouf followed her as she took her bags out of the trunk before slamming her into the car and strangling her, eventually forcing her back inside. She also accused LaBeouf of failing to disclose that he had been diagnosed with a sexually transmitted disease years prior and knowingly passed it along to her.
Also in the suit, stylist Karolyn Pho, who dated LaBeouf in the early 2010s, shared her own story of alleged physical abuse at the hands of the actor, who she said once drunkenly pinned her down on a bed and headbutted her until she bled. Pho said LaBeouf attempted to stop the two women from making an alliance by sending her a falsely disparaging email about Barnett, who stated in the suit that she intends to “donate a significant portion” of any damages received to domestic-violence charities.
LaBeouf responded to the accusations with apologies and denials.
Shortly after Barnett filed her suit, LaBeouf was dropped by his talent agency, CAA, and replaced with Harry Styles in Olivia Wilde’s film Don’t Worry Darling. Denying rumors that he had been fired, he told Variety he’d quit over rehearsal time, and a source told People the actor was going on hiatus as he continued inpatient treatment. Meanwhile, in emailed statements to the New York Times, LaBeouf said many of the accusations the two women had made against him were “untrue” while noting that he owed them “the opportunity to air their statements publicly and accept accountability for those things I have done.” LaBeouf — who, prior to the suit, had been arrested several times for assault and disorderly conduct, charges that were eventually dropped — told the paper he was committed to recovering from his PTSD and alcoholism and “will forever be sorry to the people that I may have harmed along the way.”
His attorneys took a different approach: In a legal response to the suit, obtained by People, they denied “generally and specifically, each and every allegation” Barnett and Pho had made. LaBeouf’s team also denied that Barnett — who said in her suit that she planned to donate a significant portion of any monetary damages she received to domestic-violence charities — sustained any injuries or loss at their client’s hands and further denied that she was “entitled to any relief or damages whatsoever.” LaBeouf’s lawyers asked the judge to dismiss Barnett’s sexual-battery claims and order her to pay LaBeouf for his legal fees and “further relief as the Court may deem just and proper.”
LaBeouf later admitted in a podcast interview that he had “hurt” Twigs.
In August 2022, LaBeouf alluded to Barnett’s lawsuit on Jon Bernthal’s Real Ones podcast. “I hurt that woman,” said LaBeouf, who did not explicitly name Barnett but spoke about her accusations. “In the process of doing that, I hurt many other people, and many other people before that woman.” LaBeouf called himself a “pleasure-seeking, selfish, self-centered, dishonest, inconsiderate, fearful human being” and described Barnett as a “saint” who “saved my fucking life,” adding, “Had she not intervened … and not created this avenue for me to experience ego death, I’d either have a really mediocre existence or I’d be dead in full.”
Most recently, lawyers for LaBeouf have said Twigs cannot be emotionally distressed because her career is “thriving.”
According to filings reviewed by Pitchfork, both parties agreed to trial postponements owing to scheduling conflicts with their “entertainment projects.” But in June, LaBeouf’s team filed a request for Barnett’s medical and financial records, arguing that she had been “too busy … to appear for her deposition” and that her accusations of emotional distress cannot be true because her career has been so successful. Barnett “has alleged severe emotional distress, but she has been thriving emotionally and physically as she has been working on numerous projects and making millions,” LaBeouf’s attorneys wrote in a filing obtained by Us Weekly, citing Barnett’s 2019 album, Magdalene; her January Calvin Klein modeling campaign; and her role in the forthcoming film The Crow. “Contrary to what [Barnett] alleges, she appears to have increased her profile in the years after her relationship with Shia.”
Twigs’s lawyers have condemned LaBeouf’s “improper” requests for her private records.
In June, lawyers for Barnett filed a motion slamming LaBeouf’s “overbroad and burdensome” requests for private medical and financial information that they say go “well beyond the injuries that are actually at issue.” According to filings obtained by People, Barnett’s lawyers argue that LaBeouf’s team is improperly seeking “the entirety” of her medical history despite her having already submitted to a psychotherapy exam and turned over 1,300 pages of documentation for the trial. Barnett’s team called the requests “a significant invasion” of her privacy.
“While my client was led to believe that LaBeouf was on a path of taking responsibility and working a program, it is clear he intends his pattern of continuing to abuse the victim,” Barnett’s attorney said in a statement to multiple outlets. “Any suggestion that FKA Twigs’s emotional distress should be discounted because of any career success is preposterous and discounts the idea that victims should have hope for the future … Without the trauma that she has suffered, I can only imagine the level of success she would have achieved by now.”
The Cut has reached out to representatives for Barnett and LaBeouf. We will update this post when we hear back.