Kevin Spacey was granted unconditional bail on Thursday after appearing in British court to face four charges of sexual assault stemming from his time as artistic director at London’s Old Vic theater.
Judge Tan Ikram of Westminster Magistrates’ Court said he “had not been persuaded” that the 62-year-old actor poses a flight risk because he showed up to the hearing of his own accord, according to The New York Times.
The case will now move to a crown court for a full trial. Only about 5 percent of the most serious criminal cases beginning at magistrates’ court are transferred there.
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The charges center on three men who have accused Spacey of inappropriate behavior, including one charge of penetrative sexual activity without consent in which the actor allegedly received oral sex from a victim.
The two-time Oscar winner continues to “strenuously” deny all allegations of criminal wrongdoing through his lawyer.
The alleged assaults took place between March 2005 and April 2013 while the American Beauty actor was working at the famed London theater. In 2017, an internal investigation uncovered 20 complaints against the actor, though only one was brought up at the time. None of the incidents involved minors.
“The investigation found that his stardom and status at the Old Vic may have prevented people, and in particular junior staff or young actors, from feeling that they could speak up or raise a hand for help,” the theater concluded.
In November 2017, Harry Dreyfuss accused Spacey of groping him when he was 18 years old. His father, actor Richard Dreyfuss, was in the room during the alleged incident. The three of them were going over lines for a play that Spacey was directing at the Old Vic, the younger Dreyfuss said.
In a Facebook post a month before that, Mexican actor Roberto Cavazos detailed how Spacey habitually made passes at young male actors in the theater by setting up a “beautifully lit” picnic onstage.
“I never let it happen,” Cavazos wrote in Spanish. “But I know of some who were afraid to put a stop to it.”
Thursday’s brief hearing was comparable to an arraignment in the U.S. The actual trial could take months to begin due to a backlog of cases in England and Wales’ unified court system that was exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic.
It could be Spacey’s first sexual harassment case to reach trial.
In 2019, prosecutors in Massachusetts dropped sexual assault charges against the actor after his accuser declined to testify at a pre-trial hearing. The accuser was 18 years old and working as a busboy at a bar in Nantucket in 2016 when he said Spacey stuck his hand down his pants.
“Help me,” the accuser wrote in a text to his girlfriend at the time, according to messages shared with police. “He pulled my zipper down.”
The case fell apart after Spacey’s attorneys spooked the accuser by warning him that deleting any messages from his phone would amount to felony tampering with evidence.
Meanwhile, the allegation that blew the lid on Spacey’s alleged history of harassment is still tied up in court. Actor Anthony Rapp, known for playing Mark in the Broadway musical Rent, told Buzzfeed that Spacey tried to “seduce” him at a party in 1980 when he was 14 and Spacey was 26. He says Spacey picked him up, put him down on the bed, and “held him down while tightening his grip on him.”
Rapp sued Spacey in 2020.
In April, Spacey’s attorneys filed a motion to dismiss the case, claiming that he barely had any contact with any of Rapp’s “intimate” body parts during the brief encounter.
Spacey’s career suffered after Rapp’s explosive 2017 allegations. Within weeks, he had been dropped by big-name agency CAA as well as his publicist, Staci Wolfe of Polaris. He was also written out of the sixth and final season of the hit Netflix series House of Cards.
Since then, Spacey has managed to slowly dip his toe back into the acting pool, mostly in international productions. He shot a small part in the upcoming film The Man Who Drew God, directed by Italian actor Franco Nero, and will star in the upcoming thriller Peter Five Eight. He is set to begin shooting the historical drama 1242 - Gateway to the West—a co-production of the U.K., Hungary, and Mongolia—in October.
