The two-time Oscar-winning star of the stage, cinema and television – whose full name is Kevin Spacey Fowler – has disappeared from public view since he became one of the first performers to be caught up in the freshly minted #MeToo movement of October 2017.
Rapp, who currently stars in the “Star Trek: Discovery” series, turns 51 this month. He filed a complaint in September 2020 against Spacey for advances and an alleged sexual assault at a party in Manhattan in 1986.
Rapp was 14 at the time, while Spacey – now 63 – was almost twice his age.
Spacey, who built his worldwide fame since the 1980s in movies such as “The Usual Suspects” and “American Beauty” and on to the Netflix hit “House of Cards”, has always denied allegations of sexual abuse.
The #MeToo movement exploded when more than 80 women in the movie industry accused – and ultimately brought down – previously untouchable producer Harvey Weinstein.
At the end of the month, Rapp accused Spacey for the first time, in great detail, in an interview with BuzzFeed News.
The next day, on Twitter, Spacey presented his “sincerest apology” to Rapp for any “deeply inappropriate drunken behaviour”, saying he did not recall the incident.
After a 2020 criminal charge of sexual assault was dismissed by a judge, Rapp filed a civil suit that will see Spacey in a Manhattan courtroom starting tomorrow, in a case to be heard by a jury and presided over by judge Lewis Kaplan.
If found guilty, Spacey faces significant damages.
Kaplan had dropped Rapp’s initial charge of sexual assault, ruling it had been brought too late and was not covered by a New York state law on child protection, implemented in 2019.
However, the judge acknowledged that during the party in 1986, Spacey had fondled the 14-year-old boy’s buttocks, lifted him onto a bed and laid partially on top of him while fully clothed.
Other lawsuits
During his testimony 35 years after the incident, Rapp agreed there had been “no kissing, no undressing, no reaching under clothes, and no sexualised statements or innuendo” during the incident that had lasted no more than two minutes.
Spacey has been hit by other charges in both the US and United Kingdom. In August, a California judge ordered him to pay almost US$31 million (RM144 million) to the production company responsible for making “House of Cards” series, from which he was fired when accusations of sexual harassment against him emerged.
In London, he is being prosecuted for sexual assault against three men between March 2005 and April 2013, when he was a theatre director, and to which he pleaded not guilty last July.
And in Massachusetts, Spacey was charged with indecent assault and sexual assault on an 18-year-old bar worker in July 2016. The charges were dropped in July 2019.