The craziness of the Kevin Spacey misconduct trial

An antihero, an allegation, a court case, a neo-Nazi. The Kevin Spacey trial has been a hell of a ride and it’s barely begun.

This week, Spacey has taken the stand as the first witness in his own defense in his sexual misconduct trial, brought forward by actor Anthony Rapp.

Best known for his role in Star Trek: Discovery, Rapp claims that in 1986, Spacey, who was twenty-six at the time, invited Rapp, then fourteen, to his New York home. He alleges that Spacey picked him up, laid him down on his bed, grabbed his buttocks and pressed his groin into his body without his consent.

Rapp first made his allegation in October 2017. In the eyes of the public, Spacey went from antihero to villain. He was fired from his lead role in House of Cards and was recast in Ridley Scott’s All the Money in the World. Christopher Plummer, then eighty-eight years old, replaced him and received an Oscar nomination for his performance.

So what is Spacey’s defense? Cockburn notes that Spacey claimed he couldn’t have done anything to Rapp because it was another actor, the then-nineteen-year-old John Barrowman, whom he was attracted to. Both Spacey and Barrowman have testified that they “shared a moment together” while Rapp went to the bathroom, but their flirtation went no further, and the two left.

In a turn of events, Spacey told the court how his “white supremacist and neo-Nazi” father’s abuse stopped him from coming out as gay. He claimed that he was often “forced” to listen to “hours and hours and hours” of “hatred,” recalling how his father “used to yell at me at the idea that I might be gay.”

Spacey’s attorneys have claimed that Rapp’s “allegations are, quite simply, false and never occurred.” Lawyer Jennifer L. Keller suggested that Rapp filed the lawsuit because he is angry about his own career. “He grew bitter about not getting parts as an openly gay man,” she said.

Rapp is the most prominent of Spacey’s accusers. Cockburn finds it a curious course of events that a number of others have died.

While Rapp was considered to be the first to speak up about Spacey’s behavior, another woman accused him of harassing young men first. Linda Culkin was deemed Spacey’s psycho stalker and was sentenced to prison for death threats sent to the actor and bomb threats sent to two of his workplaces. She made allegations about his actions with young men. In March 2020, she was hit by a car and died in the hospital shortly after. No driver was charged for the incident.

The second accuser to drop dead was Ari Behn, a Norwegian author and the ex-husband of Princess Martha Louise of Norway. He accused Spacey of groping him at the Nobel Peace Prize concert in Oslo in 2007. On Christmas Day in 2019, Ari committed suicide.

In September 2020, another unknown accuser died. The man, who was a massage therapist, was suing Spacey under the name of “John Doe” for sexual assault. A month before the trial was due to start, the plaintiff’s attorney told Spacey that his client “recently passed.”

The Rapp trial continues.