Connie Leyva has publicly undercut Shia LaBeouf’s argument that California’s STAND Act does not apply to the nondisclosure agreement at the center of his dispute with FKA twigs. In a court declaration filed Wednesday, July 8, 2026, the law’s author said his reading “defies common sense,” giving twigs new backing as she asks a court to stop him from enforcing parts of the NDA.
The challenge matters because twigs says the agreement, which was included in their 2025 settlement, is being used to keep her quiet after she told The Hollywood Reporter that she still does not feel safe. Her lawyer, Mathew Rosengart, says the NDA is void and that the case was filed after LaBeouf tried to bully and intimidate her through a frivolous arbitration he filed against her last December while seeking to extract money from her.
Leyva’s declaration goes directly to the legal split at the heart of the fight. LaBeouf argues the STAND Act does not reach this deal because twigs’ original claims were for sexual battery, not sexual assault. Leyva answered that the California Legislature did not intend to create an exception for sexual batterers and let them silence victims with secret NDAs. The law was designed to stop those agreements from blocking speech about alleged sexual assault, harassment and discrimination in cases that do not end in felony verdicts.
That leaves twigs in a narrower but consequential posture. In March 2026, she filed a new complaint accusing LaBeouf of trying to silence her and asked the court to bar enforcement of parts of the NDA. The dispute traces back to a December 2020 lawsuit in which she accused him of sexual battery, assault and infliction of emotional distress, saying the relationship included abusive behavior and that he knowingly gave her a sexually transmitted disease. She also said the case was meant to help others understand “the tactics that abusers use to control you.”
LaBeouf denied many of the allegations then and said he had “no excuses” for his struggles with alcoholism and aggression. The pair, who met on the set of Honey Boy, dated for around nine months in 2018 before parting ways the following year. Their case was set for trial before the out-of-court settlement in July 2025. The terms were never made public, but the NDA inside that agreement is now the target. With Leyva siding against LaBeouf’s reading and Rosengart calling the NDA void, the open question is not whether the fight is real; it is whether the court agrees that the STAND Act wipes out the secrecy clause he still wants to enforce.
