Does Shia LaBeouf need the money, or is it the principle of the matter? Is this lawsuit strictly business, or does he have some type of personal beef with his aunt and uncle?
You'll have to infer and speculate on those questions on your own, but here's what we do know: Shia is trying like hell to get a million bucks back from his mom's brother.
According to various reports, LaBeouf's aunt says in court papers that she's being pressured by the actor's lawyers to sell off her NYC apartment on the Upper East Side to pay back a $1 million loan her husband took from LaBeouf back in 2009. In her defense, she says the apartment is worth way more than that anyway, and since her husband's name isn't on the place, Shia can't touch it.
LaBeouf loaned his mother's brother the money to help save the guy's employment agency (that didn't work, by the way), then sued his uncle and won when he didn't pay it back.
The uncle, Barry Saide, claimed at the time LaBeouf sued him that he'd previously given LaBeouf and his mom hundreds of thousands of dollars way before LaBeouf made it in Hollywood, and said he never asked for that money back. That claim hasn't stopped LaBeouf from trying to collect the cash after winning his suit.
For the record, LaBeouf reportedly earned $8 million for Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps in 2010, and $15 million for Transformers: Dark of the Moon in 2011.
