FKA Twigs is speaking up about the long-lasting effects of abuse. The singer-songwriter said this week that “being abused changes the whole of your nervous system” when speaking about her allegations against former partner Shia LaBeouf.
Twigs, born Tahliah Barnett, accused LaBeouf of sexual battery, assault and infliction of emotional distress in 2021. After several delays, the case is set to go to court in October.
“I’ve had to be very compassionate with myself and really listen to myself to get better,” Barnett told British Vogue this week. “Now I want to challenge myself to know more about the simple, most pure and important things: love, nature, food, a nontoxic lifestyle, my body.”
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Barnett also spoke up about how her experience has continued to shape her life in real time. “I think naively I thought it would be like any other breakup, that I’d be sad for six months to a year, and then one day I’d wake up and everything would be fine,” she said. “But the fact is being abused changes the whole of your nervous system. Because my window of tolerance is now much smaller than it used to be, my body manifests stress in quite extreme ways — it really shows me when it’s upset.”
Barnett’s quotes aren’t the first time she’s spoken about her experience with abuse. In a 2021 CBS This Morning interview, the singer spoke about the details of her relationship with the Transformers actor.
“He would only want me to sleep naked because he said if I didn’t then I was keeping myself from him,” Barnett said at the time. “It’s a tactic that a lot of abusers use. It’s just this constant availability, and everything centered around them. And I think that’s why I wanted to come out and talk about this. Because the signs really are there from the beginning.”
In the same interview, she said LaBeouf would tell her she was “disgusting” and “vile.”
“That’s the thing about domestic abuse, domestic violence, that it’s a real gradual step-by-step process to get somebody to a place where they lose themselves so much that they accept or feel like they deserve to be treated in that way,” she continued. “It’s not one thing, it’s loads of tiny little things that get sewn together into a nightmare.”
The Hollywood Reporter reached out to LaBeouf’s rep for comment.
