Humiliating real reason Mia Goth left Shia LaBeouf: What ‘friends and lovers’ are all saying behind his back… after Mardi Gras brawl

The doors of the New Orleans jail clanged open, and the man once Hollywood’s most bankable actor ambled out. There was no bodyguard to protect him, and no waiting agent to usher him into an idling SUV.

Shia LaBeouf was very much on his own.

Wearing the same clothes from the night before, when he was arrested for a drunken bar brawl that saw paramedics called, the 39-year-old actor wandered off into the midday haze along Perdido Street – the road named after the Spanish word for ‘lost.’ It would be hard to imagine a more sadly fitting route for him to have chosen.

He broke into a run, jogging the two miles to the center of town and the beating heart of the Mardi Gras celebrations. Soon he was back amid the Fat Tuesday revelers, beer in hand.

Once feted by Steven Spielberg as the next Tom Hanks, the troubled star has long been known for his bizarre antics. But a source close to LaBeouf has now told the Daily Mail of the private turmoil that perhaps sparked this week’s wild behavior.

Our source claims that five months ago, LaBeouf’s wife, Frankenstein actress Mia Goth, the mother of his three-year-old daughter Isabel, walked away from their tumultuous marriage.

 

LaBeouf had described Goth as his rock. In 2022 when he was in rehab, fighting the demons he just can’t seem to shake, he said she ‘saved’ his ‘f****** life.’ Now, it seems, that rock has crumbled.

‘Mia and Shia are not together anymore, and it has been like that for some time,’ the source said. ‘Mia broke it off with him, because his behavior was erratic and she didn’t want to deal with it any more as they were always getting into fights. It doesn’t look like they will be getting back together either.’

Goth, 32, met LaBeouf on the set of the highly controversial 2013 film Nymphomaniac – which featured exlicit depictions of sexual intercourse and was her big screen debut. They were married by an Elvis impersonator in Las Vegas in 2016, but filed for divorce in 2018. Two years later they reconciled, and Isabel was born in March 2022.

Goth, who stars in the forthcoming summer blockbuster The Odyssey, alongside Matt Damon, Anne Hathaway and Tom Holland, told Elle magazine in October last year that motherhood provided her with perspective.

‘I don’t have time for bulls*** in the way that maybe I did in the past and maybe that’s helped a lot,’ she said.

A coded reference to her dwindling patience with LaBeouf perhaps, as our source admitted: ‘Shia is not the easiest person to be with. He is a very intense individual, very opinionated and goes to the beat of his own drum.

‘Friends, colleagues and lovers all seem to have trouble handling him and being around him for a long time. But that is also a reason they are attracted, or want to be in his presence, because he is a very interesting guy – a one of one, very intellectual.

‘He is somebody people gravitate to, so it is a bit of a Catch-22.’

The Daily Mail has contacted representatives for LaBeouf and Goth for comment. 

Los Angeles-born LaBeouf, whose Californian father is of Cajun origin, was reported by Page Six to have moved last year to New Orleans, where he is said to have relatives.

Famous from the age of 13 for his role in Disney sitcom Even Stevens, LaBeouf’s troubles pre-date his stardom. In fact, he has said that much of his struggle comes from childhood PTSD.

His father Jeff LaBeouf was a Vietnam veteran, alcoholic and drug addict who made a living as a clown. Before his son was born Jeff spent time in prison for attempted rape: he said he was ‘blackout drunk’ and on cocaine at the time, and has no memory of the events.

LaBeouf’s mother Shayna – who separated from Jeff when Shia, their only child, was three – designed her own jewelry.

When LaBeouf was nine and living with his mother at a rough biker’s community in the LA suburb of Tujunga, he heard her being raped next door. The horror has haunted him ever since.

There have been multiple arrests for public intoxication and fights, and drunken racist rants. There was the time he interrupted a Broadway play to yell abuse at actor Alec Baldwin: LaBeouf, who had been sleeping rough in Central Park, was supposed to be his co-star but had been fired from the production after hounding Baldwin during rehearsals.

There have been stints in rehab, and the 2020 lawsuit filed by former girlfriend, singer FKA twigs, accusing him of strangling, shoving and verbally abusing her for months. LaBeouf denied the allegations and a settlement was reached.

At times the actor has expressed frustration at his own shortcomings and outbursts. In 2018, promoting his role as John McEnroe in the film Borg-McEnroe, he told Empire magazine: ‘McEnroe was a master at his rage. I’m a buffoon. My public outbursts are failures. They’re not strategic. They’re a struggling motherf***** showing his ass in front of the world.’

His mother, with whom he was extremely close, died in August 2022, and his father said he moved to Costa Rica not long after his son’s highly-publicized 2013 altercation with Baldwin.

Speaking in 2019, the elder LaBeouf said: ‘Every parent worries when their children are doing bad.

‘My grandfather was arrested for making moonshine. I rode with some pretty crazy people in Vietnam and some pretty crazy people on the streets of Los Angeles. I’ve lived outside the law, and I’ve lived within the law.

‘When I saw Shia getting in trouble, I recognized it, and I hoped and prayed it would end.

‘But at the same time he was in trouble with society, he was in trouble with me. He brought it to me first. When he went off on Alec Baldwin? They were going to do a play together, and to his credit he didn’t touch him but he scared the f*** out of him.’

Shockingly he admitted: ‘A week before that, he scared the f*** out of me. I told him, “Please leave. Don’t hurt me.” I came down here, and he continued to get in trouble. I’d hear about it on the internet, or somebody would post it on my Facebook page.

‘Eventually, I said, “You know, it’s out of my hands. It’s more than I have the knowledge or the capacity to fix. Please, God — if there is a God, and I believe there is — do whatever you do to help him.”‘

Those who know the mercurial LaBeouf fear that New Orleans, during Mardi Gras, is far from where he should be to fix his problems.

One local told The Hollywood Reporter that the actor had been ‘terrorizing the city’ since Thursday, with a bouncer at the Ms Mae’s dive bar describing him as ‘somewhat belligerent.’

The Daily Mail saw him hopping from one boisterous venue to another, downing beers and taking selfies with fans. As night fell he was pictured shirtless and on the floor, having headbutted a fellow reveler and been pinned to the ground by a passerby.

It is all very far from the promise of the fresh-faced 21-year-old who appeared on the cover of Vanity Fair in 2007. Nearly two decades on and the only photos he’s posing for are mugshots.

But back then he was focused and told anyone who would listen that he was determined to not squander his opportunities. He said he wanted to be as great as his idols – Philip Seymour Hoffman, Gary Oldman, Joaquin Phoenix. Perhaps he did not realize that all three are as known for their superlative acting as their struggles with substance abuse.

‘I don’t like going to clubs,’ LaBeouf told the magazine. ‘If I’m gonna party, I’ll do it at my house.

‘And to say that I’ve never had a drink or smoked weed – coming from my family – is insane.

‘But also, I know what it does if you get out of control. I know how hard it was to get my life to where it is. There’s so much riding that those small little joys of the high are not interesting to me.’

But for all his good intentions, somehow those ‘small little joys’ have won out. LaBeouf chased them to the beer-soaked squalor of a street brawl and the cold hard reality of a holding cell.

And, as witnessed this week, he followed them right back to the bars of New Orleans the moment of his release.