After weeks of global headlines, star witnesses, and harrowing testimony from four accusers, Kevin Spacey was found not guilty Wednesday on all nine charges in his U.K. sexual assault trial.
A jury of nine men and three women, who began deliberating two days ago, acquitted Spacey, 63, of charges including indecent assault, sexual assault, and “causing a person to engage in penetrative sexual activity,” which would have carried a maximum sentence of life imprisonment.
It marks yet another legal win for the embattled actor, who has faced allegations of sexual misconduct on both sides of the pond. In October, a New York federal jury found him not liable for battery in a civil lawsuit brought by Rent actor Anthony Rapp, who was one of the first people to publicly accuse Spacey of sexual misconduct in 2017, amid the #MeToo movement.
ADVERTISEMENT
During the month-long trial in London’s Southwark Crown Court, prosecutors had painted the House of Cards actor as a “sexual bully” who preyed on four men between 2001 and 2013, while the actor was living in London. Three of the four accusers testified that Spacey aggressively groped them; the fourth said Spacey drugged him and performed non-consensual oral sex on him while he was passed out in Spacey’s flat.
One accuser described meeting Spacey in a pub with a group of friends before eventually going back to Spacey’s hotel bar for a drink. “At that point, he kissed my neck twice and grabbed my crotch. He said the words ‘be cool, be cool’ twice,” the man said in a recorded police interview played in court. “I put my arm between us and pushed him against a wall. I said ‘I am sorry, I don't bat for that team.’”
But the defense insisted that the encounters either didn’t happen or were consensual, arguing that it is “not a crime to have sex, even if you’re famous.”
Defense attorney Patrick Gibbs also questioned the truthfulness of the four accusers, calling them “liars” and claiming his client had been “tried by social media.”
“The reality is that false allegations, even apparently convincing false allegations, really do happen,” he said. “Not always, but really do sometimes happen, especially where fame and money and sex and secrets and shame and sexual confusion are all in the mix.”
Spacey himself took the stand in his own defense to tearfully and vehemently deny the charges. He told jurors he “did not have a power wand that I waved in front of people’s faces whenever I wanted someone to go to bed with me.”
He characterized the hotel bar incident as a “clumsy pass” and said that his accuser’s testimony backed up his claim that “the moment he told me he was not interested, I stopped.”
In response to a second accuser who said Spacey once grabbed his crotch so violently while driving that he nearly ran off the road, Spacey said, “That never happened. I was not on a suicide mission in any of those years.” The accuser said the grope happened while they were driving to Elton John’s annual gala in 2004 or 2005 but Spacey provided evidence that he was filming in Australia at the time.
In response to a third accuser who said Spacey violently and painfully grabbed his genitals at a charity event in 2005, Spacey said he would never publicly “embarrass myself in such a way.”
And in response to his fourth accuser, who claimed Spacey assaulted him while he was passed out in Spacey’s flat, Spacey said the two had enjoyed a “very nice and lovely evening” but the man suddenly turned “suddenly awkward” during an intimate encounter and “hurriedly left.”
“If he regretted it immediately, I don’t know. I can’t speak for him, but something was weird,” Spacey said, adding that phone records showed the pair kept in contact for several months after.
Spacey also broke down on the stand as he described how he felt when Rapp accused him of sexual assault in 2017.
“My world exploded,” he told the court through tears. “There was a rush to judgment and before the first question was asked or answered, I lost my job, I lost my reputation, I lost everything in a matter of days.”
The defense called on several witnesses to bolster their case, including Elton John and David Furnish, who testified remotely from Monaco about Spacey’s attendance at just one of the couple’s annual charity gala balls in 2001.
Nevertheless, prosecutor Christina Agnew insisted during closing arguments last week that the case involved an “enormous power imbalance” from a man “who is used to getting his own way.”
“Four separate men who told friends and relations what happened to them, then told police, then came to court to tell their accounts,” she said. “Are they all motivated by ‘money money money’ as you were dramatically told by the defendant when he gave his evidence? Or have they just had enough and are no longer prepared to be the ’secret keeper’ for someone who treated them so badly.”
Earlier this month, Rapp addressed Spacey’s trial to The Daily Beast, saying, “A trial is a harrowing experience for victims of abuse, and I sincerely hope these men are served with the proper outcome: that Kevin Spacey is punished for his crimes”
Juda Engelmayer, a crisis communications expert who is also Harvey Weinstein’s spokesperson, told The Daily Beast that the Spacey case stood apart among other #MeToo scandals.
“[I]t is the first celebrity case that I know of dealing with gay and same-gender accusers and accused,” Engelmayer said. “The fact that he was exonerated twice now demonstrates that perhaps the age of making decades-old accusations that are taken as definitive by social justice warriors fueled by social media mobs is coming to an end, and that due process and legal justice are still the healthy guideposts for civil society.”
