Shia LaBeouf Says He Was Raped During #IAMSORRY Piece, Gives Silent Hour-Long Interview - VIDEO

In the beginning of the year, Shia LaBeouf created a performance art piece entitled #IAMNOTSORRY, in which he silently sat in a room with a paper bag over his head and invited fans to shame him for plagiarizing author Daniel Clowes.

And according to a recent silent interview LaBeouf did (with accompanying email correspondence), he was raped during that very art installation event in Los Angeles.

When asked about the installation ("what started as an actual full blown existential crisis") by journalist Aimee Cliff in a series of emails, LaBeouf explained:

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.

Still, there were others who came in with an agenda they couldn’t let go of. Some folks would come in, take my bag off, pop off a selfie and bounce. That felt terrible.

One woman who came with her boyfriend, who was outside the door when this happened, whipped my legs for ten minutes and then stripped my clothing and proceeded to rape me… There were hundreds of people in line when she walked out with dishevelled hair and smudged lipstick. It was no good, not just for me but her man as well. On top of that my girl was in line to see me, because it was Valentine’s Day and I was living in the gallery for the duration of the event – we were separated for five days, no communication. So it really hurt her as well, as I guess the news of it travelled through the line. When she came in she asked for an explanation, and I couldn’t speak, so we both sat with this unexplained trauma silently. It was painful.

As a result of these email correspondences (read them here), LaBeouf performed an entirely silent interview with Cliff, which she describes as "more a metamodernist encounter."

The entire thing was LaBeouf's idea. As he explained it, "I'm present in the magazine only in words obtained digitally and online I'm present only through a mute physical presence ... (A)nd the reality of my self lies somewhere between and beyond the two it's thoroughly metamodern I think."

You can watch the silent interview (with occasionally awkward laughter) above.

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