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Jury Swiftly Sides with Kevin Spacey in Lawsuit Accusing Him of Sexual Battery in 1986, Finds the Actor Not Liable

 
Kevin Spacey

Actor Kevin Spacey arrives at U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York on Oct. 20, 2022 in New York City. (Photo by ED JONES/AFP via Getty Images)

A federal jury on Thursday sided with actor Kevin Spacey in a lawsuit accusing him of sexual battery against a 14-year-old boy in 1986, clearing him of any liability after only about an hour of deliberation.

“Mr. Spacey is grateful to live in a country where the citizens have a right to trial by an impartial jury,” Spacey’s lawyer Jennifer Keller told Law&Crime. “Justice was done today.”

The lawsuit was from Anthony Rapp, who testified that Spacey of picking up Rapp “like a groom holds a bride over a threshold” and placed him on Spacey’s bed during a gathering at Spacey’s Manhattan apartment in 1986. Rapp said the incident badly traumatized him, and his lawyers asked jurors to award $40 million in damages.

Rapp’s allegations were first publicized in an October 2017 article in BuzzFeed written by Rapp’s longtime friend Adam Vary.

But Spacey testified that he’s sure the incident never happened and that he’d never been alone with Rapp, the Oscar-winning actor had apologized to Rapp in a social media post shortly after the BuzzFeed article.

He testified that he realized in February 2018 that the story couldn’t be true after researching where he’d been living in 1986, the layout of the apartment and Rapp’s description of events.

RELATED: Kevin Spacey Tells Jury in Civil Sex Assault Trial That His Father Was a Neo-Nazi, Addresses Jeffrey Epstein And Pizzagate Rumors

Spacey also testified about his father’s white supremacist views and the intense privacy surrounding his sexual orientation, as well as the rumors about his links to Jeffrey Epstein, saying they made him more sensitive to accusations and motivated his apologetic social media post shortly after the BuzzFeed article published.

This is a developing story.

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A graduate of the University of Oregon, Meghann worked at The Spokesman-Review in Spokane, Washington, and the Idaho Statesman in Boise, Idaho, before moving to California in 2013 to work at the Orange County Register. She spent four years as a litigation reporter for the Los Angeles Daily Journal and one year as a California-based editor and reporter for Law.com and associated publications such as The National Law Journal and New York Law Journal before joining Law & Crime News. Meghann has written for The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, Los Angeles Magazine, Bloomberg Law, ABA Journal, The Forward, Los Angeles Business Journal and the Laguna Beach Independent. Her Twitter coverage of federal court hearings in a lawsuit over homelessness in Los Angeles placed 1st in the Los Angeles Press Club's Southern California Journalism Awards for Best Use of Social Media by an Independent Journalist in 2021. An article she freelanced for Los Angeles Times Community News about a debate among federal judges regarding the safety of jury trials during COVID also placed 1st in the Orange County Press Club Awards for Best Pandemic News Story in 2021.