Shia LaBeouf Raped During Performance Art Project
Actor, Shia LaBeouf, talks to a contributor from Dazed & Confused Magazine, Aimee Cliff, about being raped during his art performance #IAMSORRY. After writing a few articles on LaBeouf, he reached out to Cliff via email asking to start a dialogue.
The dialogue of Cliff’s conversation with LaBeouf was posted on Nov. 27. A portion of the conversation discussed a bit of LaBeouf’s five day art performance, #IAMSORRY, which happened in February located at an empty art gallery at the corner of Beverly and Fuller in Los Angeles. During the event, LaBeouf met with each person one on one with no talking.
During their online conversation, one question was asked:
“What kinds of connections did you form with people during #IAMSORRY?”
LaBeouf talks of how a single individual would enter through a curtain where he was located sitting with a paper bag over his head. He says, “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.”
The second question read:
“Did any experiences stand out to you as particularly moving or unsettling?”
LaBeouf recalls of a woman who came to the exhibit with her boyfriend. When she entered the room alone, LaBeouf says that she whipped him ten times and then stripped him of his clothing and continued to rape him. After she left the private room, others saw her smeared lipstick and disheveled hair. With all the assumptions from the other people, it finally reached LaBeouf’s girlfriend who was also in line for the exhibit. She questioned him on what happened, but they both just ended up sitting in the room in silence with upset feelings.
Shia’s collaborators, British artist Luke Turner and Finnish artist Nastja Säde Rönkkö, said as soon as they found out of the incident they immediately “put a stop to it.”
Reported by many other well-known news outlets, another online journalist Piers Morgan tweeted accusing Shia LaBeouf’s rape story as an offensive publicity stunt.
In response to Morgan’s tweet to Turner on why they just let LaBeouf’s rapist walk away, Turner replies, “It wasn’t clear at the time precisely what had happened, & the 1st priority was to ensure everybody’s safety in the gallery … She ran out, rather than simply walking away. Beyond that, it’s not my place to comment.”
