Shia LaBeouf pleaded guilty to punching three people outside a bar in New Orleans on Fat Tuesday — an "F-word" laced-fight caught on cellphone video that's since gone viral — and was sentenced to probation on Wednesday, according to media reports.
Despite that video and the request of one victim that prosecutors pursue hate crime charges against the Transformers actor, the judge accepted a plea deal made by prosecutors and LaBeouf's lawyer and dismissed the incident as nothing more than a "tussle." She discounted accusations he showed any "bias or prejudice" to his victims.
LeBeouf, who currently has three new films in production, must attend an alcohol treatment program under the sentence handed down by Orleans Parish judge Juana Marine-Lombard, according to his attorney, Sarah Chervinsky.
LaBeouf posted a $100,000 bond on Feb. 26, after a judge revoked his initial release on his own recognizance. He spent nine days behind bars following his arrest early on the morning of Feb. 17 in the city’s historic French Quarter during Mardi Gras celebrations, as Out reported.
Police say they were called at 12:45 a.m. because LaBeouf was allegedly “causing a disturbance and becoming increasingly aggressive” inside the bar, and started punching people after being escorted outside.
Video of the street fight shows a shirtless LaBeouf outside that bar shoving one person to the ground and hitting another person in the face, "causing his nose to possibly dislocate," according to a New Orleans police report. Police said LaBeouf repeatedly called two men "faggots," including while he was being arrested.
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Jeffrey Damnit, a local drag entertainer who was in makeup when LaBeouf punched him, said LaBeouf also pushed him from behind at the bar earlier that night, shouting homophobic slurs and threatening his life.
He told the Guardian in February that the actor's behavior was “a complete slap in the face to any alternative-culture person.”
“Due to his fame, if he gets away without serious consequence, anyone who looks up to him or even just knows of him will think it is OK to do the same,” Damnit said. “They will think you can call someone ‘faggot,’ punch him a few times, get a free room for the night and be back out partying by noon the next day.”
Damnit’s attorney said after the sentencing that his client hopes LaBeouf’s behavior improves after the actor undergoes substance abuse treatment. Orleans Parish District Attorney Jason Williams said in a statement that his office consulted with all three victims to ensure their support before offering LaBeouf the plea deal.
LeBeouf, who turns 40 next week, pleaded guilty to three counts of simple battery. In addition to sentencing him to two years' probation, Judge Marine-Lombard handed him a six month suspended sentence. He was ordered to stay away from both his victims and that bar.
Despite his antigay rant, the judge ruled she saw “no evidence it was about bias or prejudice.” Chervinsky said it was clear to her that LaBeouf wanted “to take accountability for his part in what happened” and called it a “minor Mardi Gras bar tussle.”
It's hardly LaBeouf's first one.
As The Advocate reported in 2011, LaBeouf got into a bar brawl in Los Angeles after another patron called him "a fucking faggot." Although police put them both in handcuffs, neither that man nor LaBeouf opted to press charges.
Then in 2014, Out reported LaBeouf was arrested for disrupting a performance of Cabaret at Broadway's Studio 54. He admitted on Jimmy Kimmel Live that he sexually assaulted Alan Cumming.
"I give him a slap on the ass because I think he deserves it," LaBeouf told the late night TV host. "He's seducing me -- I mean, he's the sexiest man I've ever seen ... I grabbed a whole cheek because I wanted the party right here in my pants."
LaBeouf began receiving outpatient treatment for addiction days after his arrest, and he later pleaded guilty to disorderly conduct.
"There was an atmosphere, when I went down to go onstage and start the show, that everyone was freaking out because there was someone who seemed to be a crazy person shouting and stuff," Cumming told Conan O'Brien on his talk show the following week.
"We've all done things where we've been out of it and messed up," Cumming said. "I just think that not everyone doesn't have to deal with it on a worldwide scale and I thought he made a very good recovery, and he did say the reason he did it was because I was the sexiest man he'd ever seen."
11 times J.K. Rowling did something wildly transphobic, ranked
J.K. Rowling attends day four of Royal Ascot at Ascot Racecourse on June 20, 2025 in Ascot, England.
This story originally appeared on Out.
For almost a decade now, Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling has been spreading transphobia and has become the poster child for the UK’s troubling movement of TERFs (trans-exclusionary radical feminists). She has gone on transphobic tirades on social media, written a nearly 4,000-word anti-trans manifesto, donated some of her fortune to anti-trans causes, regularly misgenders trans women, and gleefully celebrates every time the transgender community has their rights stripped away.
The author, once revered for creating an inclusive fantasy world where good triumphs over evil, let her LGBTQ+ fans down by consistently doubling down on her transphobic rhetoric. She has painted trans women as predators who are lying about their gender to take away women’s rights and enter women’s spaces under false pretenses. This dangerous vitriol has even caused many of the stars of the Harry Potter franchise to come forward and call her out for her anti-trans takes.
For queer and trans fans of Harry Potter, this abrupt turn was jarring and has undermined their love of a fictional world where marginalized groups are loved and fought for. But Rowling hasn’t just disappointed her fans by spreading her hateful views; she’s also done so in some of the most bizarre ways, leaving many people not just outraged, but scratching their heads.
11. Tone deaf Dolly Parton tribute
Rowling joined the world in mourning Dolly Parton by posting a tribute on X that backfired when the country music legend’s fans came out in droves to point out that Parton loved the LGBTQ+ community and wouldn’t have supported Rowling’s TERF views.
After Parton fans flooded Rowling’s comment section with messages like, “She certainly would have thought of you as a nasty, hateful woman. Nice little tweet though,” Rowling attempted to hit back after a user called her “a fucking monster” by posting, “Well, joke’s on you, because neither of us want Jolene to take our man.”
10. Accidentally wrote “f*ck up some TERFs” on a child’s drawing
Seemingly by mistake, Rowling replied to post on X about a nine-year-old kid’s drawing of Ickabog, a monster from her children’s book, by including text she likely meant to copy and paste elsewhere.
“I love this truly fabulous Ickabog, with its bat ears, mismatched eyes, and terrifying bloodstained teeth! In court, Wolf claimed the Facebook post in which he’d said he wanted to ‘f*** up some TERFs’ was just ‘bravado’. #TheIckabog.”
Internet sleuths figured out that in the post, Rowling was misgendering Tara Wolf, a trans woman accused of assaulting Maria MacLachlan, who was at an anti-trans protest in 2017.
9. Accused Olympic boxer Imane Khelif of being trans
When Algerian boxer Imane Khelif took home gold at the 2024 Paris Olympics, Rowling joined fellow wealthy bigot Elon Musk in spreading the rumor that the cisgender boxer was secretly a man, leaning hard into the ever-present transphobia and anti-intersex hate in women's sports.
Even after both Rowling and Musk were named in a criminal complaint filed with French authorities over alleged “acts of aggravated cyber harassment,” Rowling refused to let it go and continued to post anti-trans posts accusing Khelif of lying about her gender.
8. Transvestigated another athlete
Less than five months after harassing Olympic boxer Imane Khelif for supposedly being trans, Rowling joined in on another transvestigation of a woman in sports when she accused cisgender Zambian soccer player Barbra Banda of secretly being a man — she is not.
Rowling took exception to the BBC naming Banda the 2024 Women’s Footballer of the Year. “Presumably the BBC decided this was more time efficient than going door to door to spit directly in women's faces," Rowling wrote on X.
7. Smoked a cigar to celebrate being a TERF
After donating £70,000 (roughly $88,200) to the anti-trans group For Women Scotland in 2024 to help them fight against a 2018 Scottish law that legally recognized trans women as women, Rowling celebrated in a ghoulish way when the U.K. Supreme Court decided that trans women aren’t considered women under the nation’s Equality Act.
Rowling responded to the court decision by posting a photo of herself with a drink in one hand and smoking a cigar with the other. While people like right-wing commentator Megyn Kelly commented “God bless you,” the post was also full of people slamming her for her cruelty in the face of people having their rights taken away. Pedro Pascal even called her out for doing “Voldemort villain s---" and referred to Rowling as a "heinous loser."
6. Accidentally turned herself into a meme
Rowling accidentally turned herself into a meme when she changed her profile pic on X to a photo that showed what looked like black mold-covered walls inside her mansion.
While the photo most likely shows wallpaper and not mold, users ran with it and began joking that the black mold had infected her brain as an explanation for her hateful anti-trans views.
5. Whined about being doxxed
On the eve of Transgender Day of Remembrance in 2021, comedian Holly Stars, actor Georgia Frost and drag king Richard Energy protested Rowling’s anti-trans views by staging a demonstration and posting a photo holding signs in front of the author’s home near Edinburgh, Scotland.
Rowling took exception to her house numbers being visible in the photo and accused the “actor activists” of “doxxing” her in an eight-tweet rant on X. But is it doxxing if the information is already public? Rowling claimed she received “so many death threats I could paper the house with them,” but both of her residences are historical landmarks, and one even has its own Wikipedia page.
4. Wrote a transphobic character that sounds an awful lot like herself
Under her pen name Robert Galbraith, Rowling wrote The Ink Black Heart, where a character gets harassed and doxxed because of their transphobic and racist views.
Rowling claimed that the character wasn’t based on her own experience, despite Rolling Stone writing that the character is doxxed “with photos of her home plastered on the internet” and subjected “to death and rape threats for having an opinion,” which probably sounds pretty familiar to people who have been following the author’s anti-trans outbursts.
3. Called David Tennant the "gender Taliban"
Rowling called Harry Potter actor David Tennant and people like him the “gender Taliban” in a post on X after he spoke out at the British LGBT Awards, where he called transgender critics “a tiny bunch of little whinging f*ckers who are on the wrong side of history, and they’ll all go away soon” and said they are on the “wrong side of history.”
In response, Rowling leaned into hateful anti-trans rhetoric that conflates being transgender with being an abuser of women. “This man is talking about rape survivors who want female-only care, the nurses currently suing their health trust for making them change in front of a man, girls and women losing sporting opportunities to males and female prisoners incarcerated with convicted sex offenders,” she wrote.
2. Dared police to arrest her
Rowling spoke out against Scotland’s new hate crime act in 2024 by daring police to arrest her for misgendering trans women. The act criminalizes “stirring up hatred” regarding age, disability, religion, sexual orientation, transgender identity and variations in sex characteristics, which can result in a fine or a seven-year prison sentence.
Rowling then went on a lengthy tirade on X — something she is known for at this point — where she accused lawmakers of protecting trans women at the expense of “the rights and freedoms of actual women and girls.” She finished by telling the police to come and arrest her if what she wrote “qualifies as an offense” under the new law. “I look forward to being arrested when I return to the birthplace of the Scottish Enlightenment,” she wrote.
1. Posted an upskirt photo
Rowling, who claims to be a protector of women and rails against trans women being allowed in women’s restrooms, targeted a transgender British podcaster who she disagrees with by posting an upskirt photo of her. Freda Wallace became Rowling’s latest target when she refused to engage with the transphobe online.
Rowling responded by misgendering Wallace and posting a photo of her originally taken by anti-trans activist and fellow transphobe Maya Forstater, from slightly below Wallace to show her upper thigh. Rowling said that Wallace refused to debate her but to prove she has “no hard feelings” she posted the photo of another debate. “I hear he left an indelible impression on the audience. And the chair,” Rowling wrote.