Actor Kevin Spacey facing sexual assault charges in Britain
LONDON — British authorities have authorized criminal charges against Kevin Spacey on four counts of sexual assault against three men, the country’s Crown Prosecution Service announced in a news release on Thursday.
Rosemary Ainslie, head of the service’s special crime division, said in the release that Spacey, 62, had “also been charged with causing a person to engage in penetrative sexual activity without consent.”
The authorization of charges followed a review of the evidence collected by London’s police force. Spacey cannot be formally charged unless he enters England or Wales, a spokesman for the service said in a telephone interview. The spokesman declined to comment on whether the service would pursue extradition proceedings if that did not occur.
The news release said the charges concerned three complainants. The incidents dated from March 2005, August 2008 and April 2013, it added — a time when Spacey was artistic director of the Old Vic theater in London. All the alleged incidents occurred in London, except one from 2013, which occurred in Gloucestershire, England.
Representatives for Spacey did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
The first person to publicly accuse Spacey of sexual misconduct was actor Anthony Rapp, who said in 2017 that Spacey had made unwanted sexual advances toward him in the 1980s, when he was 14 years old.
Soon after that a former television anchor came forward to accuse Spacey of sexually assaulting her son, and then 20 people who worked with Spacey at the Old Vic theater in London, where he was artistic director for 11 years, accused him of inappropriate behavior.
The theater commissioned an independent investigation and issued a report that concluded that “his stardom and status at the Old Vic may have prevented people, and in particular junior staff or young actors, from feeling that they could speak up or raise a hand for help.”
Representatives of the Old Vic said that they could not comment on the ongoing criminal proceedings.
TV and film producers started dropping Spacey from projects after Rapp went public and more allegations followed, including from the Netflix political drama “House of Cards,” which finished its run without the actor.