(New York) Five years after the #metoo surge, fallen star Kevin Spacey appeared in New York on Thursday in a civil lawsuit brought by American actor Anthony Rapp, who accuses him of “sexual assault” when he was 14 years in 1986, what the actor of House of Cards deny.
Posted at 7:15 a.m.
Updated at 7:05 p.m.
The former Oscar-winning star actor was rather relaxed and smiling, dressed in a blue suit, white shirt and tie, sitting just feet away from his accuser Anthony Rapp in Manhattan Federal Civil Court all day.
Anthony Rapp, 51 at the end of October, is seeking $40 million in damages. He is much less famous than 63-year-old Kevin Spacey. He starred in the series Star Trek: Discovery.
Before a popular jury of six women and six men, the lawyers of the two actors crossed swords for the first afternoon of a trial which should last ten days.
The facts date back to 1986.
Anthony Rapp is 14 years old, an apprentice Broadway actor. Spacey is also a young theater actor, an unknown barely 27 years old.
Dating on Broadway
Teenage Rapp and young Spacey meet briefly backstage at a New York theater, and the latter invites him a week later to dinner with some friends at his Manhattan studio.
According to the prosecution and presiding judge Lewis Kaplan, who recorded the facts in an order last June, once the guests left the small party, Spacey and Rapp found themselves sitting on the edge of the bed, the TV on .
Spacey then “lifts” the teenager and “his hand ‘rubs’ the garment covering his buttocks for a few seconds”. Then, Spacey “puts Rapp on the bed, on his back, before lying down fully clothed, briefly, next to and on top of” the 14-year-old boy.
PHOTO YUKI IWAMURA, ASSOCIATED PRESS
Anthony Rapp (left)
Anthony Rapp manages to “extricate himself” and leaves the studio.
But more than 35 years after the fact, his lawyer Peter Saghir accused Kevin Spacey on Thursday of having sought “deliberately” to “satisfy his sexual desires”.
“It was not a simple heckling,” thundered the lawyer.
However, in this civil trial – the criminal procedure had been abandoned after Rapp’s complaint in September 2020 – the initial charge of “sexual assault” was not retained by Judge Kaplan.
The facts are considered statute-barred and outside the scope of a 2019 New York State child protection law, which may extend the statute of limitations.
“Emotional Distress”
The judge upheld the charge of “harming the physical integrity” of Anthony Rapp having caused “emotional distress”.
In fact, for Kevin Spacey’s lawyer, Jennifer Keller, the sexual assault “never took place”. Anthony Rapp “repeated the same false story” in the media but “never to the police”, she accused.
At the end of October 2017, at the beginning of the #metoo movement, Mr. Rapp first accused Mr. Spacey, in great detail, in the media BuzzFeed News. The next day on Twitter, Kevin Spacey had presented his “sincere apologies” to him for his “drunk and deeply inappropriate (man) behavior”.
During his depositions before the trial, Anthony Rapp had admitted that there had been “no kissing, no undressing, no touching under the clothes and no statement or insinuation of a sexual nature” during an “exchange” which did not didn’t last more than two minutes.
Double Oscar winner for Usual Suspects and American Beauty, Kevin Spacey Fowler, by his full name, disappeared from screens and boards after being one of the first artists swept away just five years ago by the global #metoo wave that left the United States.
He has already had run-ins with the law in the United States and the United Kingdom. In London, he is being prosecuted for sexual assaults on three men between March 2005 and April 2013, when he was a theater director, and for which he pleaded not guilty last July.