In the sacred texts of my hysterical feminazi coven, there are a few political fixed points: women are people, my body my choice, believe victims, Chris Pratt is life. But when actor Shia LaBeouf revealed, four days ago, that he was raped by a female visitor at his February performance art piece #IAMSORRY, the public reaction felt anything but fixed. I saw expressions of doubt, scorn and outright rage from people across the ideological spectrum – some fellow feminists included. (Feminists, it should be noted, are also the only ones I see defending LaBeouf. The scant response from “men’s rights activists”, supposed champions of male victims, seems to mainly revolve around how effeminate LaBeouf is for not fighting his attacker hard enough.)

And the confusion is understandable, to a degree. LaBeouf’s circumstances are unusual to the point of anomaly; his behaviour over the past decade, along with his persona itself, seems to be a study in unreliable narration; and #IAMSORRY, as I understand it, was a commentary on vulnerability and violation, so how can we trust that his purported violation during a moment of self-constructed vulnerability is a genuine account and not an artistic manoeuvre to support his point?

The fact is, it doesn’t matter. A victim doesn’t have to be relatable or reliable or likable or “normal” – or even a good person – for you to believe them. You can be utterly baffled by someone’s every move and still take their victimisation seriously. LaBeouf’s bizarre behaviour and his sexual violation are in no way mutually exclusive, nor are the latter and his gender. “He was asking for it.” “Why didn’t he fight back?” “Why didn’t he say ‘no’?” “He must have wanted it.” “He seems crazy.” These are flat-out unacceptable things to say to a person of any gender. In a culture where male victimhood is stigmatised as feminine and weak (toxic masculinity is, above all, an extension of misogyny), believing male victims isn’t oppositional to feminism, it is a feminist imperative.

The truth is that we know almost nothing about LaBeouf’s emotional and psychological state during #IAMSORRY. But we know that in the past year he has described his own actions as “crazy” and part of an “existential crisis”, that he has undergone treatment for alcohol addiction, that he spent a traumatic night in jail in restraints and a Hannibal Lecter mask, and that all of this is seemingly part of a pattern of erratic public behaviour stretching back at least to 2005. Was he even capable of consent during #IAMSORRY? I have no idea – I don’t know him. But when I’m not sure about something, I try to err on the side of compassion.

And if you feel comfortable speculating – as most of the media has for the past decade – that LaBeouf might be grappling with some mental health and/or addiction problems, you should feel just as comfortable believing that mental illness or addiction could have impaired his consent. We are so gleeful with the diagnosis, but so dismissive of the consequences.

Men are just as capable as women of being taken advantage of during emotionally fragile moments. Men are just as capable of freezing up and going into shock. And men are just as likely not to report their assaults, because of exactly the backlash that LaBeouf is facing now. And if he still just seems “crazy” to you, remember that mental illness makes a person more likely to be the victim of sexual assault, not less.

Whether or not you think LaBeouf recklessly threw himself into a vulnerable situation, whether or not he “could” or “should” have fought back, whether or not you think #IAMSORRY is good art or bad, literally the only thing that matters here is that a woman chose to sexually violate him. The turning point – the moment when #IAMSORRY pivoted from a goof into a horror – came not from any of LaBeouf’s choices, but from that woman’s. She did it. No one else.

If someone had stabbed Yoko Ono during Cut Piece, would we be hazy on whether or not that was murder? If someone had shot Marina Abramović dead during Rhythm 0, would the shooter’s choice to kill be considered irrelevant to either the criminal investigation or the meaning of Abramović’s work? No. It would have been central to both. That, in fact, is a fundamental tension of her piece – even if someone offers you dominion over their body, you still have a choice, and an ethical imperative, to respect their humanity. Unless, of course, you don’t think of them as fully human. The dehumanisation of celebrities, I think, is not irrelevant here.

In no rational universe should LaBeouf have been expected to hang a sign in the gallery that specifies: “Please do not rape the artist.” As his collaborators clarified on Sunday: “Nowhere did we state that people could do whatever they wanted to Shia during #IAMSORRY.” And – here is the heart of it – even if they had said such a thing, the choice to beat and rape him would still have been wrong.