Kevin Spacey has emerged victorious in the era of
A New York court jury ruled Thursday that the 63-year-old House of Cards actor is not liable in the sexual assault civil lawsuit filed by his colleague Anthony Rapp, who has claimed $40 million in compensation.
The matter must have seemed very clear to the eleven members of the jury because they were in the deliberation room for barely ninety minutes, after leaving the courtroom in the early afternoon. Rapp stood with a stoic posture and an inscrutable face as he heard the verdict, while Spacey happily hugged one of his lawyers. Once again, he couldn't help but shed tears.
“We are grateful that the jury has seen the truth,” said the defense attorney, Jennifer Keller. "The jury has spoken," added Richard Steigman, attorney for the plaintiff.
Rapp, a performer on Stark Trek: Discovery, accused Spacey of sexually assaulting him in 1986, when he was 14 years old and participating in a Broadway play. According to his testimony at trial, that experience was “the most traumatic event” that has ever happened to him.
The case was known in October 2017, just as the movement broke out
The case was the professional ruin of Spacey, who from the stand denied the accusation and assured that he barely remembered the plaintiff. Spacey took the opportunity to explain that he hid his homosexuality from him until then because of the trauma of having a neo-Nazi father who threatened and called him a "faggot."
The two actors responded to the interrogations in separate interventions of several days charged with emotion. Rapp assured last week that he went to Spacey's apartment in Manhattan, and that he had to flee after the host pounced on him, after "feeling his full weight on top", in what he described as an attack that left him a great emotional trauma.
Judge Lewis Kaplan already lowered the burden of the lawsuit before concluding the oral hearing, by ruling out the emotional distress claim for legal reasons. In this way, only the issue of sexual assault remained. In June, the judge already denied the assault request because the victim had waited too long to file that complaint.
In his turn, with a flushed face and a trembling voice, Spacey denied everything in his two days of testimony. He recalled between sobs the humiliations and terror after hours and hours of listening to the anger of his father, Thomas Geoffrey Fowler, "instilling hatred and fanaticism in me," he confessed.
"He used the F word, which is very derogatory to the gay community," he said. The “F-word” stands for “bassoon”, fagot. “I had never talked about this publicly. Never,” he added.
“He yelled at me – he alluded again to his father, described as a white supremacist – because, if I was interested in theater, it was because he was homosexual. He never encouraged me to develop my career”, he insisted. “He repeated homophobic insults to me,” he reiterated.
Faced with the accusation of "fraud" raised by Rapp's lawyer, because Spacey hid that he was gay until this story came to light, the interpreter of Usual Suspects claimed to be the victim of his father's outburst of anger. "Everything that happened in that house I felt I had to keep it a secret and never tell anyone," he said.
If he was so long without coming out of the closet, it doesn't mean he was a fraud. “I was not a lie, I was not living a lie. I was reluctant to talk about my personal life,” he stressed. And he stressed: “I have learned my lesson. You should never apologize for something you haven't done." He thus retracted the statement he made when Rapp accused him, in which he apologized if he had ever bothered someone "with inappropriate alcoholic behavior."
