Late last year, singer FKA twigs came forward with chilling abuse accusations against Shia LeBeouf.
She came forward reluctantly, only after it became clear that she needed to push to get Shia to change his alleged behavior.
Now, FKA is speaking out because she knows that her experiences are not unique.
Sitting down with Gayle King, she recently opened up in her first TV interview since filing a lawsuit against her ex.
FKA twigs accuses Shia of sexual battery, assault, and inflicting emotional distress during their erstwhile relationship.
“He would often just start having an argument with me in the middle of the night,” she related to Gayle King.
She shared that Shia would accuse her of “doing all sorts of things,” but especially “planning to leave him.”
“He would wake me up to tell me that I was disgusting,” FKA related, “I was vile.”
While none of this was true, FKA recalled how she came to doubt herself in the face of his accusations.
“He would only want me to sleep naked,” FKA shared, “because if he said if I didn’t, I was ‘keeping myself’ from him.”
“So, you know, it’s a tactic that a lot of abusers use,” FKA observed.
“It’s this constant availability,” she described, “and everything centered around them.”
“That’s why I wanted to come out and talk about this,” FKA added. “The signs really are there from the beginning.”
Beyond the clip that we included, FKA recalled how early in their romance, he would jump the fence to visit her residence and leave small gifts.
At the time, she found the gestures to be “very romantic.”
In hindsight, FKA shared, she realized that Shia was “testing [her] boundaries” and realized that this was “inappropriate.”
FKA also spoke about the allegations of physical abuse, when Shia became “physical” with her.
She recalled how he “would push [her] and then he would say, ‘You fell.'”
FKA also detailed a horrible night … on which Shia allegedly threatened her life and his own.
Once again swept up in the paranoid belief that FKA twigs was going to leave him, she said that he was speeding in the car.
She described him “speeding down the motorway and saying that if I left him — or, if I said that I didn’t love him and if I was gonna leave him — that he would smash the car into the side of a wall.”
“I thought, wow, he needs so much control over me that he would rather kill us both,” FKA recalled.
Later that night, she told Gayle, Shia choked her in public — a horrible event that she also described elsewhere.
FKA also noted how Shia allegedly demanded that she kiss or touch him a certain number of times each day.
Control, threats, obsessive behavior, paranoia, testing of boundaries, and violence — these are all hallmarks of abuser tactics.
Shia LaBeouf has since denied all parts of FKA’s allegations against him.
Notably, she says that she would never have gone public if he had sought therapy.
Our hearts go out to FKA twigs as she shares these difficult stories. No one deserves to be a victim of abuse in any way shape or form.
