Kevin Spacey has denied allegations that he made unwanted sexual advances toward actor Anthony Rapp when the latter was a teenager, adding the reason he waited so long to come out as gay was because of his father’s neo-Nazi beliefs.
It was Spacey’s first day on the stand in Rapp’s $40 million sexual civil misconduct lawsuit.
Spacey reiterated that Rapp’s accusations that in 1986, when Spacey was 26 and Rapp was 14, Spacey climbed on top of Rapp when Rapp was attending a party at Spacey’s home, “are not true.”
In response to Rapp’s charge that Spacey was a “fraud” for withholding his sexual orientation until after Rapp publicly accused him in 2017, Spacey responded that he “wasn’t living a lie.” “I was just reluctant to talk about my personal life,” he explained.
Spacey said he was so hesitant to reveal that part of his identify because growing up, his father “was a white supremacist and a neo-Nazi,” who “used to yell at” Spacey when he began being interested in theater “at the idea that I might be gay.”
Earlier in the proceedings, U.S. District Judge Lewis A. Kaplan dismissed Rapp’s allegations of intentional infliction of mental distress, citing sections of the claim that were repetitious of his other claim of assault and battery.
Earlier in the proceedings, U.S. District Judge Lewis A. Kaplan dismissed Rapp’s allegations of intentional infliction of mental distress, citing sections of the claim that were repetitious of his other claim of assault and battery.
After New York approved the Child Victims Act in 2020, Rapp filed a lawsuit against Spacey. He claims that after meeting Spacey backstage at a Broadway performance, Spacey invited Rapp to a party at his Manhattan residence. Spacey reportedly got on top of Rapp and laid him on a bed while Rapp was watching TV in a bedroom, and then Rapp “wriggled out.”
“I was frozen. “I was pinned underneath him,” Rapp claimed last week, adding that he “didn’t want” Spacey to do that to him. Since Rapp originally came out five years ago, over 30 people have made similar accusations against Spacey, some of which Spacey has rejected or not replied to. He was accused with four charges of sexual assault and one count of nonconsensual penetrative conduct in the United Kingdom this summer, and pleaded not guilty.