Five years after the movement #MeToo which cost him his career in the fall of 2017, theKevin Spacey’s civil trial in New York has begun. The former American star was confronted, Friday, October 7, with comedian Anthony Rapp, who accuses him of sexual assault in 1986, when he was 14 years old. The latter claims 40 million dollars damages to the actor.
Now 50, Anthony Rapp told the Manhattan Civil Court jury about his evening “troubling” more than 35 years ago, when he was an apprentice actor on Broadway. Kevin Spacey, then a young 27-year-old theater actor, had invited him out to dinner with friends at his Manhattan studio. According to his testimony last June, Anthony Rapp reports that once the guests left, Kevin Spacey took him “raised” and “his hand ‘rubbed’ for a few seconds the garment covering his buttocks”.
Then Kevin Spacey “put Rapp on the bed, on his back, before lying down fully clothed, briefly, next to and on” him. In court, Anthony Rapp repeated on Friday that he the star hugged him and felt “his groin” against her teenage body. “I had the impression that it lasted a very long time, I felt paralyzed”said the actor, who managed to “extricate oneself” and leave the studio.
The lawyer ofAnthony Rapp on Thursday accused the actor of House of Cards to have sought “deliberately” at “to satisfy one’s sexual desires”. In this civil lawsuit, the initial charge of sexual assault was not retained by the American federal justice, because theThe facts are considered prescribed. The court upheld the charge of“harm to physical integrity”causing a “emotional distress”.
The criminal procedure had been abandoned after Anthony Rapp’s complaint in September 2020. Kevin Spacey is also being prosecuted in the UK on charges of sexually assaulting three men between March 2005 and April 2013, when he was a theater manager. He pleaded not guilty in July.