Kevin Spacey’s next stage: Court
He faces a sex crime charge next week.
Kevin Spacey has probably walked the last red carpet of his Oscar-winning career, but next month, he’ll be doing a “perp walk” to a Massachusetts courthouse to face a sex crime charge in Nantucket.
Kevin Spacey Fowler (his real last name), 59, is due to be arraigned Jan. 7 on a felony charge of indecent assault and battery. He is accused of groping the 18-year-old son of a Boston TV anchorwoman in a Nantucket restaurant bar in the summer of 2016.
In October 2017, a string of men began coming forward to publicly accuse him of sexual misconduct dating back decades and crossing jurisdictions from London to Los Angeles.
Spacey is one of dozens of prominent men in the entertainment and media industries who have lost jobs, careers, families and reputations after being accused of sexual misconduct dating back decades and ranging from harassment to rape. Former movie mogul Harvey Weinstein will face trial in 2020 on five sex crime charges involving two women in New York.
Under Massachusetts law, Spacey is required to show up for his arraignment, where he will be brought before a judge to hear the charges against him and enter a plea – all in an open courtroom.
The arraignment could last only minutes, but it will be the first time Spacey has been seen in public in more than a year. That doesn’t count the surreptitious paparazzi shots of him at an Arizona sex addiction rehab clinic where he went in November 2017 after actor Anthony Rapp accused Spacey of trying to rape him when he was 14 in 1986.
Spacey posted a video on YouTube hours after the sex charge became public Monday, titled “Let Me Be Frank.” In it, Spacey delivers a “House of Cards”inspired monologue as his former character, Frank Underwood, questioning whether people should believe “the worst without evidence.”
“Because I can promise you this: If I didn’t pay the price for the things we both know I did do, I’m certainly not going to pay the price for the things I didn’t do,” he says toward the end.
There may be another video involved in the case, according to The Boston Globe and online news service MassLive, quoting a report by Massachusetts State Police trooper Gerald Donovan, who investigated the case.
In his report, Donovan wrote that the accuser told police he sent a three-minute phone video of Spacey touching the front of his pants to his girlfriend via Snapchat. The girlfriend confirmed she got a video, the report said.
The Globe reported late Wednesday that both sides in the case have copies of the video, even though Snapchat content is designed to disappear eventually. It shows someone’s hand touching another person’s shirt but does not show anyone being groped, according to the Globe.
Spacey’s video Monday brought a surge of mocking, outraged tweets from celebs and non-celebs alike. “Creepy,” pronounced actress Alyssa Milano, an activist in the #MeToo movement.
What was the point? Is it Spacey speaking or Underwood? If he didn’t want to put out a straightforward denial of the charges, why bother with a video stunt?
“It’s a real gamble. I think he may have been going for (the idea that) Underwood is diabolical but people still like him, he’s the villain you can still root for,” says former New York state prosecutor Adam Citron. “It could definitely hurt (Spacey) tremendously, but by the same token, it may be that people will still like him.”
Could the video be used against him by prosecutors at trial as some sort of admission of a past pattern of conduct? Maybe not; it’s too vague to be an admission, Citron says.
“I think he’s a very artistic person and he’s venting,” Citron says. “I do not think he’s doing this with the intent of later alleging insanity (as a defense).”
Spacey “was looking to play to the court of public opinion. I think he lost,” says Ronn Torossian, an expert in crisis communication and CEO of 5W Public Relations. “I think it was very weird and very odd. It’s a bad mistake that I think will ultimately hurt him.”
At the arraignment, Spacey will be represented by his latest defense attorney, Alan Jackson of Los Angeles, plus a local lawyer named Juliane Balliro. Neither of them returned messages from USA TODAY.
Police and prosecutors clammed up after a former Boston TV anchorwoman, Heather Unruh, appeared at a news conference in November 2017 to accuse Spacey of assaulting her son by sticking his hand down the teen’s pants while trying to get him drunk at the Club Car restaurant on Nantucket in July 2016.
For more than a year, Nantucket police, prosecutors and Unruh’s Boston attorney, Mitchell Garabedian, said nothing in response to queries from USA TODAY about the status of the case.
They were just as closemouthed Monday after Cape & Islands District Attorney Michael O’Keefe issued a statement confirming that Spacey had been charged. He did not say why it took more than a year after the allegation to do so. His spokeswoman, Assistant District Attorney Tara Miltimore, did not return messages from USA TODAY on Wednesday.
O’Keefe told The Globe that a probable-cause hearing was held behind closed doors Dec. 20, after which Magistrate Ryan Kearney issued a criminal complaint for the charge against Spacey.
The Globe obtained an audio of the proceeding, reporting that it indicated how Spacey’s lawyers plan to defend him, in part by raising doubts about the accuser’s credibility. The teen, who had been drinking with Spacey even though he was underage and told Spacey he was 23, told police Spacey groped him for about three minutes, but he didn’t move away or tell Spacey to stop.
“That’s an incredibly long time to have a strange man’s hands in your pants, correct?” Jackson asked the trooper. “I would agree with that. Yes,” Donovan replied, according to The Globe’s report on the audio.
Citron, who is familiar with Massachusetts law, says the state allows prosecutors, police or accusers to seek a probable-cause hearing not open to the public (although the defendant or his lawyer can be present) to discuss evidence they have gathered and allow a magistrate, rather than the district attorney, to decide whether there is enough to proceed with a criminal charge.
“Because of the high profile of the case and who’s being charged, I think they went the route of getting a judge involved right away at a hearing on whether he should be charged, so the burden doesn’t fall on either the police or the prosecutors in case it turns out (the charges) aren’t true,” Citron said.
Unruh said in a statement Monday to Boston media that she was “pleased” the case would move forward. Garabedian added his own statement, praising her son for showing “a tremendous amount of courage” in coming forward. “Let the facts be presented, the relevant law applied and a just and fair verdict rendered,” he said.