A bizarre exchange took place in a British court on Friday at Kevin Spacey’s sex assault trial where he described one of his accusers’ allegations as “absolute bollocks.”
Spacey was asked about claims from one of the four men he is accused of assaulting in the U.K. between 2001 and 2013 in which the alleged victim said the Oscar-winner painfully grabbed his crotch “like a cobra.” When Spacey called the man’s version of events “bollocks”—a British curse word for testicles which is also used to describe something as nonsense—prosecutor Christine Agnew replied: “Yep—because that’s exactly where you did grab him, isn’t it?”
“Really?” Spacey said in response, The Independent reports, before asking the judge, “Did he accuse me of grabbing his bollocks?” The judge in turn asked Spacey to respond to the question, to which he ultimately answered, “I did not.”
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He was further asked about why he thinks the accuser would make up an untrue allegation about him. “Money, money, and then money,” Spacey said. Earlier, the actor was also questioned as to whether he regularly used “the crotch grab” after meeting men for the first time. He said he didn’t. “It is the term grabbing a crotch or groping a crotch that I object to,” Spacey added.
At another point in the proceedings, laughter broke out in the courtroom’s public gallery in response to one of Spacey’s answers. After saying he was “of course” lonely at times, he was asked if he reached out to others sexually. “Welcome to life,” he said, prompting the laughs.
Agnew also pressed him on his sexual history. “I, at times, was promiscuous and I had casual, indiscriminate sexual encounters,” he answered, adding, “It doesn’t make me a bad person.” The Hollywood star was also grilled about whether he found it easier to pick up people on account of his fame. “I’m sure if I had wanted to I could have had sex with lots of people all the time,” he said. “But I didn’t.”
Spacey separately renewed his denials about an allegation from a former aspiring actor who said he woke up at Spacey’s London apartment to find him sexually assaulting him. Spacey said he remembered the night in question because it was the only time a man suddenly left his property. “I can remember the end of the evening,” he said. “We had a consensual sexual experience.” He characterized it as a “romantic situation.”
In regard to claims from another complainant—who said Spacey told him to “be cool” before grabbing his crotch—Spacey denied the man’s description of what happened. “We all had a lot of drinks,” Spacey said. “This has happened to millions of people who make a pass at someone, got the wrong signals, are embarrassed, and try to move on.”
The court was told that the actor apologized to the man the following day, with Agnew suggesting that he did so in a bid to stop the complainant from telling anyone about what had happened. “You can twist it if you’d like,” Spacey said, denying that’s why he apologized.
