How Shia LaBeouf’s childhood with abusive dad and hearing his mum’s rape led him to self-destruct
HE’S the child star whose drunken arrests and bizarre behaviour came to define his adult career as much as his movies. But Shia LaBeouf now stands accused of domestic abuse, after ex FKA Twigs filed a lawsuit over “sexual battery” and Sia branded him a pathological liar who conned her into an “adulterous relationship.” The […]
HE’S the child star whose drunken arrests and bizarre behaviour came to define his adult career as much as his movies.
But Shia LaBeouf now stands accused of domestic abuse, after ex FKA Twigs filed a lawsuit over “sexual battery” and Sia branded him a pathological liar who conned her into an “adulterous relationship.”
The actor, now 34, seemed the ultimate success story when he landed the lead in the Disney series Even Stevens at 13.
But his childhood was rocked with trauma, including a drug-addicted dad who abused him, verbally and physically, and witnessing the rape of his mum when he was nine, leaving him with PTSD.
“The only thing my father gave me that was of any value is pain,” the actor told Interview magazine in 2014.
“My dad is the key to most of my base emotions. My greatest and my worst memories are with my father, all my major trauma and major celebration came from him. It’s a negative gift.”
Dad pointed loaded shotgun at young son
Conceived on a sleeping bag in the back of his dad Jeffrey’s van, Shia was raised in the poverty-stricken area of Echo Park, in Los Angeles, until he was nine.
His dad, an army vet who saw three tours in the Vietnam war, was haunted by the horrific sights he’d seen and remembered “loading GIs in plastic bags onto planes to come back to the States”.
“That was a trauma that I’ve carried with me for my life,” he said in a 2019 interview and he once pointed a loaded gun at his son during a flashback .
Jeffrey, a hot dog salesman and rodeo clown, was an alcoholic and heroin addict and also a convicted sex offender, having been jailed for attempted rape in 1980 after attacking a stranger in her car.
“I was blackout drunk. I’d done cocaine and also alcohol,” he told GEN in 2019.
“I’m 6 foot 3; this person was 5 foot 2 and 29 years old. It hurt my heart to see her in the courtroom. I was appalled. I have no clue why I was in that car, whether I was carjacking the car or what.”
When Shia was tiny his dad controlled him by hanging him upside down from one foot.
“When he wanted to have a tantrum and scream and holler and cry, I would pick him up by one foot upside down, and he would totally change,” Jeffrey said.
“His demeanor would go to wonder and awe. And there was no need to spank him.”
Guilt over mum’s rape led to violent rages
Jeffrey and Shayna – who Shia calls “my everything” – split when their son was three years old.
Evicted from the Echo Park flat when Shia was nine, Shayna moved to Tajunga, the biker gang capital of San Fernando Valley.
Worried for their safety, Jeffrey asked biker neighbour Dave to keep an eye on the pair – but he couldn’t protect Shayna from a horrific rape in her own home, which Shia overheard.
“I froze,” he told Esquire magazine. “The man ran out, and my mum ran after him.
“Dave came running over. I remember he had a crossbow.” The man was never caught.
The trauma left him determined to protect his mum and at 19, he pulled a knife on a neighbour who had insulted her and ended up being beaten up by the man and six of his friends.
Shia would later claim his arrest in 2017, in a Savannah car park, was triggered by the guilt he felt over not being able to protect his mum from the unknown attacker.
“The first time I got arrested with a real charge, it stemmed from the same s***,” he said.
“Some guy bumped into my mother’s car with his car in a parking lot, and my head went right to ‘You need to avenge your mother!’ So I went after the dude with a knife.”
As soon as he was legally able to, he bought a gun, which he sleeps with, to this day.
“I’ve always thought somebody was coming in,” he said. “My whole life.”
Living in seedy motel and abused by dad
Struggling to beat his own heroin addiction, it was Jeffrey who introduced his son to marijuana and cigarettes at just 10 years old.
Shia also had to learn to deal with his dad’s substance abuse.
“When you’re 10 years old and watch your father going through heroin withdrawals, you grow up real fast. You become the parent in the relationship,” Shia said.
“But I must give him credit because he always told me that he didn’t want me to be like him.”
A stand up comedian at 10, Shia decided to try his luck at screen roles after meeting another child actor who was raking in a fortune.
After appearances in ER and The X-Files, Shia got his big break when he landed the role of Louis Stevens in the Disney series Even Stevens.
Jeffrey took on the role of his on-set guardian and, in order to be close to the studio, they moved to a £30-a-night motel where a “pimp and his prostitute” shared the next door room.
Shia later revealed his dad attacked a gay Disney executive who gave the teenager a congratulatory hug on set.
The actor also claims his dad subjected him to mental and physical abuse – a past he examined in his 2019 film Honey Boy, when he played a character based on Jeffrey.
He was subjected to angry tirades and abusive language, although Jeffrey has denied punching him.
“I never hit Shia in the face. I did threaten him one time,” he said.
“I threw him in an overstuffed chair with my fist on his collar and raised my other fist and said, “Now you want to try me, you little punk?” or something like that.”
But he appears unapologetic, bragging that his approach must have worked because, “he was a millionaire at 18!” he says. “I’m proud of my son. He’s my honey boy, my money honey!”
Drunk-driving, on-set LSD trips and assault and ‘rape’ claims
Shia went on to star in the blockbuster Transformers movies, with Megan Fox, as well as starring in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.
But cracks began to show as early as 2007, when the then 21-year-old was arrested after refusing to leave a Chicago pharmacy.
A year later, he was involved in a car crash in Hollywood and lost his licence for a year after he was found to be well over the drink drive limit and in 2011, he was once again arrested after a drunken brawl in an LA bar.
By now evidence of drug and alcohol addiction were apparent and Rupert Grint, who starred with Shia in the psychological drama Charlie Countryman, said the actor prepared for a drug scene by actually taking LSD.
“He smashed the place up, got naked and kept seeing this owl,” the Brit star told the Guardian. “If anything will make you not do drugs, it’s watching that.”
The actor’s behaviour got even more bizarre during a plagiarism row, when he was accused of ripping off writer Daniel Clowes in his short film, HowardCantour.com.
On New Year’s Eve, 2013, he hired a plane to skywrite “I am sorry Daniel Clowes” over LA before announcing, a week later that he was “retiring from public life” over “recent attacks against my artistic integrity.”
He then attended the premiere of his film Nymphomaniac, at the Berlin Film Festival, wearing a paper bag on his head, complete with eye-holes and the words “I am not famous anymore” scrawled on the front.
He also put on a “performance art” exhibit at an LA gallery where visitors chose from a variety of objects bearing Twitter remarks about the actor, before walking into a room where he sat at a table with the bag on his head, occasionally removing it and silently crying.
He later claimed he was sexually abused by a woman who “whipped my legs for ten minutes and then stripped my clothing and proceeded to rape me” during the installation.
In June 2014, he was arrested and charged with disorderly behaviour after “annoying other theatre goers by slapping random people on the behind and on the back of the head” at a performance of Cabaret at Studio 54.
The same year he was filmed trying to start a fight outside a strip club, was thrown out of a restaurant for urinating up the wall and chased a homeless man down the street in an attempt to steal his McDonald’s meal.
The star finally checked into rehab, in 2017, after another arrest following the altercation in the car park in Savannah, Georgia, over his mother’s prang.
A video emerged showing Shia swearing at a black police officer, before telling him he was “going to hell… ’cause he’s a black man” and issuing a gun threat.
PTSD from childhood trauma
In rehab, he later revealed, he was told he was suffering from PTSD as well as the abuse meted out by his dad.
“A lot of my s*** has to do with my relationship with my dad,” he says. “That dude is my gasoline.”
He has previously said the pair only speak when he needs to stir up emotions for an acting role.
“He knows to pick up the Skype phone call, and he knows what I’m looking for,” he said. “It’s not to say ‘Hey, Dad.’ We manipulate each other. We service each other. I use him when I go to work. It’s not a real conversation; it’s just an excuse to rev up. He’s the marionette puppeteer.”
Despite their fractured relationship, Shia has previously claimed he was “blessed” to have the traumatic upbringing he endured.
“My dad handed me a lot, and his legacy was an emotional one. And it wasn’t scarring,” Shia said. “He handed me texture. My dad blessed me that way.”
Charges of sexual battery and deliberately infecting ex with STD
On Friday, Brit singer FKA twigs launched a lawsuit in which she claimed the Hollywood actor, who she dated from 2018 to 2019, had strangled her and deliberately infected her with an STD.
In an interview with the New York Times, another one of the star’s ex-girlfriends, Karolyn Pho, claimed he pinned her to the bed while drunk and headbutted her until she bled.
Yesterday, Australian singer Sia piled on the pressure, accusing Shia, 34, of being a “pathological liar”.
The Chandelier star, 44, praised FKA twigs, 32, for her courage but also made a plea for help for the “sick” actor.
She wrote: “I, too, have been hurt emotionally by Shia, a pathological liar, who conned me into an adulterous relationship claiming to be single. I believe he’s very sick and have compassion for him AND his victims.”
Most read in Showbiz
The actor has not denied the charges, saying: “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.”
He added: “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.”
The new allegations threaten to scupper Shia LaBeouf’s return to grace, just two weeks before the Oscar-tipped Pieces of a Woman, co-starring Vanessa Kirby, launches on Netflix.
Once again, the troubled star’s self-destruct bottom seems set to derail his life.