Actor Kevin Spacey during his arraignment for sexual assault charges at Nantucket District Court on January 7, 2019 in Nantucket, Massachusetts.
The judge in the Kevin Spacey case has granted the defense team’s request to inspect the alleged victim’s phone in order to check if any pertinent messages were deleted. Spacey’s lawyer has claimed that the alleged victim erased evidence; he wants the case dropped.
Massachusetts District Judge Thomas S. Barrett directed the order to the accuser, his mother Heather Unruh, attorney Mitchell Garabedian and Garabedian’s law firm. They must turn over the alleged victim’s phone to the Massachusetts State Police, so that it can be given to the defense’s expert witness, Sankara Shanmugam.
Shanmugam, Vice President of digital forensics and incident response at Stroz Friedberg, wrote in an affidavit that the cell phone data provided by prosecutors does not contain the original database from the phone. He said he needs the phone itself in order to conduct a thorough examination.
“In order to conduct a complete analysis of the phone and to recover and identify deleted messages, we would need to make a proper forensic image or extraction of the phone itself from which we could run our tools and conduct our own analysis,” Shanmugam wrote.
Spacey was charged in December 2018 for allegedly sexually assaulting an 18-year-old bus boy at The Club Car in Nantucket, Massachusetts back in July 2016. Prosecutors said Spacey got the boy drunk and fondled him under his pants without consent. The alleged victim told investigators that he texted his girlfriend what the actor did to him and then snapchatted video proof to her, according to the incident report.
The girlfriend said she could only see a hand touching the front of her boyfriend’s pants in the snapchat video. The boy’s sister also claimed that she woke up on the morning of July 8 to find her brother visibly distraught. Her brother said to her that Spacey assaulted him. Spacey pleaded not guilty in Jan. 2019.
Spacey was fired from House of Cards in 2017 after several men accused him of sexual misconduct.
[Image via Nicole Harnishfeger-Pool/Getty Images]
