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Rapp told BuzzFeed News that the entertainment industry conversations sparked by the Weinstein exposés led him to “try to shine another light on the decades of behavior that have been allowed to continue [by] many people, including myself, being silent.” After the interview ran, Spacey wrote in a tweeted statement that he could not remember the encounter with Rapp.
“But if I did behave then as he describes, I owe him the sincerest apology for what would have been deeply inappropriate drunken behavior, and I am sorry for all the feelings he describes having carried with him all these years,” Spacey wrote. He came out as gay in the same statement.
The lawsuit accused Spacey of assault, battery and intentional infliction of emotional distress, noting that Rapp “sustained psychological injuries” that, in some cases, were “of a permanent and lasting nature.” The document made the same three claims on behalf of another plaintiff referred to only as “C.D.,” who was dismissed from the case last year after U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan ruled it wouldn’t be fair for Spacey to have to defend himself against accusations made anonymously.
Reuters reported that Kaplan dismissed Rapp’s claim of intentional infliction of emotional distress during trial proceedings because it repeated aspects of the assault and battery claims.
Rapp testified that he came forward with his accusations “because I knew I was not the only one who Kevin Spacey made inappropriate sexual advances to,” according to the Hollywood Reporter, which also stated that a forensic psychologist who evaluated Rapp said in court that he dealt with “a tremendous amount of shame, guilt and confusion” after the alleged assault. Variety reported that Rapp described the encounter as “the most traumatic single event of my life.”
According to Deadline, Spacey’s lawyers argued that the test results leading to Rapp’s diagnosis with post-traumatic stress disorder were inconsistent to the extent they were “unusable.”
Spacey said in court that the allegations against him were “not true” and that he regretted sharing the statement he posted to Twitter, the AP reported. He added that his team advised him to post it because they saw it as the wisest way to manage “a crisis that was going to get worse.”
In his testimony, Spacey described growing up “in a very complicated family dynamic,” stating that his father was a “White supremacist and neo-Nazi” who lectured Spacey and his siblings. When Spacey expressed interest in theater, he said, his father “used to yell at me at the idea that I might be gay.”
More than a dozen others have accused Spacey of sexual misconduct, including crew members who worked on “House of Cards,” the Netflix drama series that earned Spacey 10 Emmy nominations as an actor and executive producer. He was fired from the show in 2017 over the sexual harassment allegations and earlier this year ordered to cover resulting losses by paying producers $30 million.
A sexual assault charge against Spacey in Massachusetts was dropped in 2019 due to the “due to the unavailability of the complaining witness,” and a lawsuit in California was dismissed that same year after the accuser died. Spacey is currently awaiting trial in the United Kingdom on five counts of sexual assault related to incidents alleged to have taken place in England between 2005 and 2013, including one count of causing a person to engage in penetrative sexual activity without consent.
A lawyer representing Spacey, who served as artistic director of the Old Vic theater in London at the times of the alleged encounters against three separate men, said during a court appearance in June that the embattled actor “strenuously denies any and all criminality in this case.”
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