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.
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.