NEW YORK: Hollywood star Kevin Spacey on Monday denied sexual assault charges against American actor Anthony Rapp, for which his civil trial began in New York.
“I don’t remember that I was with him at a private party or that I was with him in an apartment,” Spacey said in response to his attorney’s questions.
Spacey, who won two Oscars, missed the screen and stage, after he was one of the first artists to be touched by the global “Me Too” wave since its beginning in 2017 in the United States.
Actor Anthony Rapp, 51, who co-stars in the series “Star Trek: Discovery”, filed a lawsuit against Spacey in September 2020, accusing him of sexually assaulting him during a party in New York in 1986 when he was still 14 years old.
In his lawsuit, Rapp explained that Spacey invited him to dinner with friends in his small apartment in Manhattan, and after the other guests left, he held him in his arms while he was watching TV, and put him on a bed “before he lay next to him and then on top of him.”
During his questioning on Monday, Spacey described his father, in his first public speeches, as a “white supremacist” and a “neo-Nazi” who had neither a homosexual nor an interest in theatre.
Spacey said he was “shocked, frightened, and confused” after the 2017 accusations in an article by Anthony Rapp in BuzzFeed News, and that he issued a public apology on the recommendation of his agents, which he regrets today.
“I learned the lesson, which is that you should never apologize for something you haven’t done,” he said.
He added that he decided on that day to openly declare his homosexuality after he had been thinking about it for more than a year after he had established himself professionally in the world of acting.
“I was accused of trying to change the subject, or of trying to divert attention, or of confusing the accusation with being gay, which was never my intention,” he said, tearing, adding that he would never have done “anything that would harm the gay community.”
Spacey faces other lawsuits in the United States and Britain. In London, he is being tried for sexual assaults against three men between March 2005 and April 2013 when he was artistic director of a theatre. The star pleaded not guilty to the accusations last July.
(AFP)