London, United Kingdom. Six months after “vigorously” denying charges of sexual assault against three men in the United Kingdom, American actor Kevin Spacey returns to British justice on Friday to face new accusations of the kind that have plagued his career since 2017.
Source: AFP/Anna Cuenca
The winner of two Oscars, for “American Beauty” (1999) and “Usual Suspects” (1995), must appear this time by videoconference starting at 2:00 p.m. (local and GMT) before a judge at the London Westminster Magistrates Court.
The disgraced Hollywood star, 63, was charged last month by British prosecutors with seven new sexual assaults between 2001 and 2004 to a man whom he would have forced, among other things, “to engage in a non-consensual sexual relationship”.
These charges are added to his already heavy file before the English courts, which accused him in May of five sexual assaults on three men between 2005 and 2013, when he was director of the prestigious Old Vic theater in London.
“Mr. Spacey strongly denies any criminality in this case.”his lawyer, Patrick Gibbs, said in June during a preliminary hearing in which the actor voluntarily appeared to “defend his innocence.”
The trial is due to take place in July 2023 and given his cooperation with the UK authorities, the magistrate released him without precautionary measures.
Gibbs defended that Spacey’s work “It requires me to go to meetings, to go to casting calls, to meet with directors and writers”. But the truth is that since the first accusations against him in 2017 in the United States, his career has never recovered.
#METOO MOVEMENT
The wave of accusations that wrecked his successful career corresponded with the rise of the #MeToowhich was born in 2017 from the case of the all-powerful American film producer Harvey Weinstein.
That year Spacey was the subject of several complaints in the United States for sexual harassment and assault.
As a consequence, he was fired from the series. “House of Cards”, where he played the main character, the Machiavellian US President Frank Underwood. He was also left out of a Ridley Scott movie, “All the Money in the World,” in which he was replaced by Canadian actor Christopher Plummer.
His last big appearance on the screen dates back to 2018, with the premiere of the film “Billionaire Boys Club”.
Spacey was initially accused in the state of Massachusetts of having his hands on the sex of an 18-year-old boy in a bar in July 2016. But these charges were dropped in 2019.
Last October, the New York court acquitted him in a civil proceeding for sexually touching actor Anthony Rapp 36 years ago during an evening in Manhattan.
In October 2020, he was sentenced to pay almost 31 million dollars to MRC, the company that produces “House of Cards”, as compensation for the loss of income attributed to his exit from the successful series of political intrigues. A Los Angeles judge confirmed this compensation in August.
In June 2021, Spacey made a timid return to the cinema with the shooting in the Italian city of Turin of a feature film directed by the Italian Franco Nero and titled “L’uomo che disegno Dio” (The man who draws God) where, according to the producer, he plays a secondary character.
