Kevin Spacey, who has won Oscars for the films like “American
Beauty” and “The Usual Suspects” and a Golden Globe for the TV political drama
“House of Cards”, was sued on Wednesday by the actor Anthony Rapp and an
anonymous man. Both of them accused Spacey of sexual offenses against them in
the 1980s when they were about 14-years-old.
Nearly three years ago, Rapp accused Spacey of having made a
sexual advance toward him when he was underage, the first in a series of sexual
misconduct accusations against Mr. Spacey that halted his acting career,
reports nytimes.com.
The lawsuit, filed in New York Supreme Court in Manhattan,
includes new allegations that Spacey sexually assaulted a teenage boy whom he
met in an acting class in Westchester County in the early 1980s.
According to the lawsuit, Mr. Spacey invited his acting
student to his apartment and “engaged in sexual acts” with him on multiple
different occasions. In their final encounter, Mr. Spacey assaulted the
teenager despite him resisting and saying “no,” the lawsuit said.
Jennifer L. Keller, lawyer of Spacey, declined to comment on
Wednesday.
According to a 2017 released article in BuzzFeed, Rapp first
accused Spacey of making an inappropriate
sexual advance toward him at a party in Spacey’s Manhattan apartment in 1986.
According to the lawsuit, the acclaimed actor first grabbed Rapp’s buttocks,
lifted him onto a bed and lay on top of him. However, Rapp extricated himself
and eventually was able to flee from the apartment, the lawsuit said.
No criminal charges had been filed in association with the
case.
However, Spacey, in a statement in 2017, said he did not
recall the encounter with Rapp, but that “if I did behave then as he describes,
I owe him the sincerest apology for what would have been deeply inappropriate
drunken behavior.”
Spacey, 61, was charged almost two years ago with sexual
assault in Nantucket, Mass., after an 18-year-old man accused him of fondling
him in a restaurant in 2016. But prosecutors there dropped the case last year
after the accuser invoked the Fifth Amendment and refused to continue
testifying after Spacey’s lawyer warned that he could be charged with a felony
if he had deleted evidence from his cellphone, reports nytimes.com.
Last year, a plaintiff in a civil case , the estate of a
deceased massage therapist dropped the
lawsuit against Spacey for reasons not made clear. The massage therapist had
accused the actor of groping and trying to kiss him before offering him oral
sex during a massage.
A lawyer for the plaintiffs, Peter Saghir, said that the
lawsuit was being brought under the Child Victims Act, adopted last year, which
significantly extended New York’s statute of limitations for childhood sex
abuse. The old statute had required that criminal or civil charges be brought
before the survivor’s 23rd birthday. Under the new law, victims can sue until
age 55.