Shia LaBeouf Claims He Was Raped At #IAMSORRY Installation

Earlier this year, Shia LaBeouf had an art installation called #IAMSORRY, and now claims he had been sexually assaulted during the event. The exhibit was a bizarre event, done in collaboration with Finnish performance artist Nastja Säde Rönkkö and a meta-modernist named Turner. LaBeouf was at the center of the exhibit, sitting at a table with a paper bag over his head.

“You are directed into a room where a woman is standing behind a table that has a bunch of objects on it, and she asks you to pick one,” a source told E! “A pink ukulele, a Transformers toy, pieces of paper with tweets about Shia written on them, a whip, and a big bottle of Jack Daniels [sic] are just some of the objects you can choose from. It seems like a lot of the props are supposed to symbolize his acting career… After you pick an object, you are then told to go behind a black curtain where Shia is sitting at a small table with a bag over his head. The paper bag reads, you guessed it, ‘I am not famous anymore.’ You sit across from him. He doesn’t speak to you, he barely smiles and he apparently looks at you the whole time. Most people have noted that Shia either cries in front of them (single tears) or they can tell he has been crying before they walked into the room.”

Last month, during an interview with Ellen DeGeneres, LaBeouf spoke highly of the event, noting how surprised he was at the empathy the visitors gave him. “They stopped looking at me as like an object they started looking at me as like a human and they were very loving. It was really human…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.” However, he also noted that some were less than pleasant. “Some folks would come in, take my bag off, pop off a selfie and bounce. That felt terrible.”

Now, LaBeouf, in an email interview with Dazed and Confused, said he was taken advantage of by a female visitor. He wrote, “One woman who came with her boyfriend, who was out side the door when this happened, whipped my legs for 10 minutes and then striped [sic] my clothing and proceeded to rape me…then walked out with her lipstick smudged to her awaiting boyfriend who i [sic] image was quite hurt by it,” LaBeouf wrote. “All this happened in front of hundreds of people…Yea [sic] it was no good. Not just for me but her man as well.”

LaBeouf added that his girlfriend, Mia Goth, “was in line to come see me because it was Valentines Day & i [sic] was living in the gallery sleeping in a sleeping bag for the duration of the event – we were separated for 5 days. No communication. So it really hurt her as well as i [sic] guess the news of it traveled through the line. She was only about 25 people back when she came in she asked for an explanation and i [sic] couldn’t speak so we both sat with this unexplained trauma silently. It was painful. The hardest part of the show.”