Hollywood star Shia LaBeouf says he was raped in an art gallery during a performance of his art project, #IAMSORRY. The actor was performing as a silent audience to individual visitors when, he says, an abuser – a woman – “whipped my legs for 10 minutes and then stripped my clothing and proceeded to rape me”.

It’s extraordinary, but his clear, personal testimony is an account that some are unwilling to believe.



Since revealing his experience to magazine Dazed, LaBeouf has been pilloried by critics, online and in the media. Among the insidious attacks on LaBeouf is a suggestion that because his performance in the art gallery was about challenging his expected social role, the artistic context somehow invalidated his bodily sovereignty. In LaBeouf, mainstream suspicion of contemporary art has intersected with the ingrained cultural habit of victim-blaming, and the condemnation has been merciless.



The powerful commentator Piers Morgan took to twitter to declare that “Shia LaBeouf’s claim to have been ‘raped’ is truly pathetic & demeans real rape victims,” adding, for instruction, “Grow up, you silly little man”.



There are two problems with Morgan’s accusation. The first is that the incident has been verified by LaBeouf’s artistic collaborators, who, once they became aware of what was happening to their performer, physically intervened to “put a stop” to what was going on.



The second is that LaBeouf’s testimony accords with the experiences of many of the “real rape victims” Morgan would invoke. The treatment of LaBeouf by the likes of Morgan is revealing: those who have been lucky enough to escape the ordeal of rape do not understand what “real rape” is; their demarcation of rapes into “real” and otherwise is one of many reasons why those with the lived experience to discuss it honestly so rarely speak out.



The popular mythology around rape is that it is an explosive act of violence that occurs in the manner of a physical seizure, or an unexpected punch. Rape can certainly be like this, although it rarely is. More commonly, rape is a moment-by-moment process of deliberately borderline coercion that those subjected to it struggle to comprehend is taking place, even until the very moment a direct act of sexual violation occurs.



Reasonable people rely on the performance of roles and social contracts underwritten by trust to share intimacy or privacy – a child with an adult, a young woman on a date, a senior citizen allowing someone into their home and, yes, an actor performing in a gallery. All are in situations where the evidence of their own lived experience suggests that those they engage will not cause them harm.



Rapists are not, of course, reasonable people, but predators who exploit trust in order to enact maximum cruelty with minimal repercussion - and they employ confusing behaviour as a tactic in order to lure and/or disarm those on whom they prey.



For a start, rapists overwhelmingly resemble the reasonable people who they are not. LaBeouf’s alleged attacker turned up to the gallery with a boyfriend in tow, and beat the actor with a prop supplied by the artists. That she was going to progress from going a bit far playacting with a whip to an actual sexual assault no one – least of all LaBeouf – may have reasonably imagined.



Morgan chastised LaBeouf for “doing and saying nothing” while it happened. He should consider the profound shock to the body and the mind that occurs from a sexual assault. That LaBeouf was in shock from is clear from his description of what happened when his girlfriend came into the room after the assault: “I couldn’t speak, so we both sat with this unexplained trauma silently. It was painful.”



Morgan has denied that he’s “victim blaming” merely on the grounds that he has decided for himself that LaBeouf is not a victim. Yet as a person who’s attacked LaBeouf’s credibility for not reporting the incident to the police, Morgan reveals himself as a person who knows too little about the reality of sexual assault to have any authority to make such claims.



Revealing your experience is enough to get you publicly humiliated and shamed, in LaBeouf’s case by an international commentator. Who would wish their confusion, shock and trauma to be pored over and torn to pieces in the adversarial contest of the court room, after a police process? Morgan would be advised to consider just why it may have taken decades for the survivors of abuse by Jimmy Savile and Rolf Harris to speak out.



He’d be advised to consider how many other survivors of sexual assault may be traumatised to learn their experiences don’t fit Morgan’s definition of a “real rape”. So many among us can see their own experience of rape in what happened to the actor in that art gallery, when Shia LaBeouf says he was raped: we owe a duty to all rape survivors to believe him.