Shia LaBeouf pleads guilty to battery charges over New Orleans bar incident | Shia LaBeouf
Shia LaBeouf on Wednesday pleaded guilty to misdemeanor battery charges filed against the actor following his arrest for allegedly striking three men at a New Orleans bar in February.
The star of the Transformers movie franchise received two years of probation, alcohol addiction rehabilitation, sensitivity training and anger management classes following his plea in the city’s criminal district courthouse.
LaBeouf’s attorney in the case, Sarah Chervinsky, said her client is now “looking forward to focusing on family, work and new creative projects.” He said authorities’ investigation into the matter revealed that the actor’s arrest was “nothing more than a minor bar fight” on the morning of the Mardi Gras holiday in New Orleans.
Chervinsky denied that his client’s actions that day were motivated by “bias,” despite allegations clearly supported by the video that LaBeouf directed anti-gay slurs at the victims.
Police arrested LaBeouf after he punched two men and headbutted a third at the R Bar in New Orleans’ Marigny neighborhood around 12:45 a.m. on February 17.
In his sworn statement in court, the police said that the bar staff told him to leave the venue after he became increasingly aggressive and insulted the men he was beating with homophobic slurs. LaBeouf was briefly jailed after being released from the hospital where he was taken at the time of his arrest. But he was soon released, required to post $105,000 bail and ordered by a judge to enroll in substance abuse treatment.
The Guardian previously reported that one of the alleged victims, Nathan Thomas Reed, identified as gay and that the other was wearing a dress. The second of these men, named Jeffrey Damnit, recorded a cellphone video of LaBeouf directing the homophobic slur “faggot” at him outside the bar.
Damnit, whose last name is Klein, initially told news media that she hoped prosecutors would charge LaBeouf under a state law that allows enhanced penalties against people who victimize others based on an “actual or perceived” basis such as sex or gender, among other categories.
Hell, his video was one of many capturing the circumstances surrounding LaBeouf’s arrest.
The formal charges to which LaBeouf pleaded guilty were filed May 21 by New Orleans district attorney Jason Williams’ office. These were contained within a pricing document known as a memorandum.
Chervinsky said LaBeouf, who bought a house in New Orleans in December, went to court on Wednesday and “wants to take responsibility for his part in what happened, and that’s what he did.”
Damnit’s attorney, Michael Kennedy, said the outcome of LaBeouf’s trial is a reminder that everyone in New Orleans “is equal, and we don’t treat people differently based on relative fame.”
“The defendant in this case was given the opportunity to do better, to be better,” Kennedy said. “It is Mr. Klein’s and our entire team’s hope that substance abuse treatment, sensitivity training, and anger management will be taken seriously and that the defendant will benefit from the skills he learned in the future.”
The New Orleans case, in which LaBeouf pleaded guilty, is not his first experience with the US criminal court system.
In 2014, he was arrested over allegations that he disrupted a Broadway show in New York City and insulted a police officer with the homophobic slur “faggot” in the process.
LaBeouf was also recorded saying that police were racist and that a Black officer at the scene would go to hell during his 2017 arrest for disorderly conduct in Savannah, Georgia. This led to another previously court-mandated stint in rehabilitation.
In an interview aired less than two weeks after his arrest in New Orleans, LaBeouf told YouTube channel Channel 5 that “big gays are scary to him” given his “traditionally Catholic” faith.
He also claimed to Channel 5: “Three gay dudes [were] “He is next to me, touching my leg, before the violence before his arrest.”
“I [got] I’m scared,” LaBeouf added. “I’m sorry, if this is homophobic then so am I.”
