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scored a major victory in court today when a judge ruled he could not be cross examined about allegations he showed gay porn to a 16-year-old and made a pass at him.

Actor Anthony Rapp’s lawyers wanted to ask the actor about claims made by Justin Dawes who alleges that in 1988 Spacey – then 29 – invited him to his apartment in New York with a friend with the promise of showing him the film Chinatown.

Dawes has claimed that Spacey put gay porn on TV and made him and his friend cocktails. According to Dawes, at one point Spacey put his hand on his left leg, just above the knee.

Rapp’s lawyer Richard Steigman said this showed Spacey had a ‘sexual attraction to underage boys’ but Judge Lewis Kaplan said he couldn’t ask about it.

During the morning break, Spacey appeared confident and wandered over to Christine Cornell, a sketch artist in the public gallery, and asked to see her sketch of him being cross examined.

After nodding in approval he walked back to his bench and lounged on a chair chatting with his manager, Evan Lowenstein.

Steigman questioned Spacey about draft versions of the statement he put out in response to the October 2017 Buzzfeed article in which Rapp first made his allegations.

Spacey admitted that the first line, where he said he had a ‘lot of respect and admiration’ for Rapp wasn’t true but he was trying to be ‘cordial’ to a fellow actor.

Steigman asked Spacey about the line where he said he was ‘beyond horrified to hear this story.’

Spacey admitted that the ‘upsetting’ part was that somebody was accusing him, not that Rapp was experiencing distress.

The jury heard that in the draft Spacey wrote: ‘I only hope that not every stupid thing I did when I was drinking gets reported’.

The sentence did not make it into the final version.

Neither did one line which read: ‘I hope and pray I can be forgiven for such an appalling moment.’

Spacey said that he didn’t believe Rapp but was being advised by his PR team to apologize.

Steigman asked Spacey about an interview with the Daily Beast he gave in 2010 in which he said he would never talk about his sexuality. Yet he did just that in his statement responding to Rapp’s allegations and came out as a gay man.

Steigman asked if it crossed Spacey’s mind that revealing his sexuality at that point was a ‘good way to deflect the conversation.’

Spacey replied: ‘No sir.’

During cross examination Spacey also admitted that the drug he was using heavily in 1987 was cocaine.

Steigman asked about Spacey’s abusive upbringing and asked him if in addition to emotional abuse there was ‘sexual abuse’ as well.

Judge Kaplan instructed Spacey not to answer.

Spacey was grilled about his character in American Beauty ‘lusting after a teenage girl’ during his trial for making a pass at a 14-year-old boy.

The actor said it was a ‘fantasy sequence’ when he dreamed about Mena Suvari in a bath full of roses.

There was laughter in court as Spacey was asked about two scenes when his character was masturbating, one of which he was in the shower and saying that ‘this is the highlight of my day’.

Spacey responded: ‘He was a little frustrated.’ 

Rapp’s lawyer Steigman asked Spacey if his American Beauty character was a 42-year-old man who was ‘lusting after a high school girl who is friends with his daughter.’

Spacey said: ‘I wouldn’t say it that way but yes.’

Steigman asked about the character masturbating while having a ‘sexual fantasy’ where Suvari is in a bath of roses.

Spacey said: ‘It’s a fantasy sequence.’

Steigman said there were two masturbating scenes in the movie including one where Spacey is in the shower saying ‘this is the highlight of my day, jerking off in the shower’.

Spacey, who won an Oscar for the role, said: ‘He was a little frustrated.’

As Steigman pressed on Judge Lewis Kaplan cut in. Spacey said: ‘Can I?’ meaning explain further.

Judge Kaplan said no because the court had ‘had enough.’

Spacey won his first legal victory Monday when the judge in the civil case dismissed the claim of intentional infliction of emotional distress, leaving the jury to decide on just one count of battery.

Another count of sexual assault has already been dismissed.

On Monday, after being sworn in under his full name – Kevin Spacey Fowler – he was asked by his lawyer Chase Scolnick if Rapp’s claims were correct. 

Spacey said: ‘They are not true.’ 

Scolnick asked if Spacey’s attitude towards privacy extended beyond his sexuality and Spacey said that it did due to his childhood.

He said: ‘I grew up in a very complicated family dynamic. My father was unemployed a great deal of the time so therefore he was home a lot of the time.

‘My father fell in with some ideas and people that I believe damaged his mind and sensibility and my father was a white supremacist and neo-Nazi.

‘It meant we were forced to listen to hours and hours and hours of lectures about his beliefs and ideas.’

Spacey said it was these lectures that were the basis of his ‘hatred of bigotry and intolerance.’

He said: ‘I was humiliated and terrified of even considering bringing my friends home to my house because I was afraid of what my friends would say.

‘My best friend was Jewish. I couldn’t bring him to my house. Everything that was happening at that house was something I felt I had to keep to myself, keep private and never ever talk about anything.’

Spacey told the jury about his early life being born in New Jersey then moving to California when he was three years old.

His mother worked as a secretary and was the breadwinner but they moved nine or 10 times by the time Spacey was 11.

His acting interest was piqued by his mother who ‘loved music and movies’ and introduced Spacey to movie stars of the 1930s, 40s and 50s.

He discovered he had an ‘ear for impressions’ and said that making his mother laugh was ‘one of the greatest sounds I have ever heard.’

After being sent to military school, Spacey began to take acting workshops, including one with the actor Jack Lemmon who said his performance was a ‘touch of terrific’ – Spacey briefly impersonated Lemmon as he recounted the anecdote. 

Spacey’s friend Val Kilmer also pushed him to take up acting, Spacey said.

After Rapp made his allegations in 2017 in an article for Buzzfeed, Spacey revealed he was gay for the first time. 

Spacey said he didn’t do so sooner because of his childhood.

He said: ‘I grew up in a situation as a child where I wasn’t comfortable talking about these things. My father used to yell at me about the idea I might be gay because I was interested in the theatre.

‘My father used to scream at me don’t be a F-word that is very derogatory to the gay community. It was very disturbing for me because I was beginning to discover my own sexuality. I think I had a degree of shame but I think also I wanted people to remember the characters I was playin and not to know too much about me.

‘That’s my reasoning, I was protecting the work.’

Spacey held back his tears when asked about the part of the article which calls him a fraud for concealing his sexuality. 

Spacey said: ‘I have listened to so many LGBTQ+ leaders (who say) to have empathy and to have understanding and compassion for everyone’s process of coming out and I think that to call someone a fraud is, I guess, to think they’re living a lie.

‘I wasn’t living a lie, I was just reluctant to talk about my personal life.’

According to Spacey, he had had relationships with women which were meaningful to him, just as Rapp – who is gay – had as well. 

Spacey said: ‘I don’t know on what basis he (Rapp) was saying I was a fraud. He was clearly very angry I wasn’t out.

‘It was my choice. Even though politically it’s not something that you might agree with you, you respect it’s a very difficult process.

‘It was very difficult for me’.

When rumors began about Spacey he was already ‘very well known’, he told the jury, and had to ‘think about coming out and the consequences of that’.

Spacey said that at the time the Buzzfeed article came out in 2017 Hollywood, society was ‘reeling’ from the MeToo movement.

Spacey said: ‘There had just been a series of accusations made against Harvey Weinstein that were devastating and frightened a lot of people. The women who came forward to describe what happened to them had shown enormous bravery. But at the same time the (entertainment) industry was very nervous and I think there was a lot of fear in the air about who was going to be next.’

Through his PR at the time, Spacey was sent a request for comment by Buzzfeed journalist Adam Vary.

Spacey said: ‘I was shocked, I was frightened, I was confused.’ 

The email did not mention specific locations and Spacey was unable to figure out where it could have happened.

Only the next day once the article had been published did Spacey put out a comment saying that if the incident happened, ‘I owe him the sincerest apology for what would have been deeply inappropriate drunken behavior.’

But Spacey told the court that he now regretted that apology. He said: ‘I was encouraged to apologize. I have learned a lesson which is you never apologize for something you didn’t do.’

Spacey said that he had ‘never been alone’ with Rapp and he ‘didn’t know how that (the allegation) could be possibly true.’

With tears in his eyes, Spacey said that his team of advisers and publicists ‘knew this wasn’t me.’

He said: ‘I was never interested in children.’

Spacey became the most emotional when talking about his decision to come out as gay in his statement responding to Rapp’s allegations.

Addressing the court, Spacey said he wanted to do something ‘positive’ and said that ‘maybe I could finally put the question of my sexuality behind me’

Spacey said: ‘But it was not greeted that way. I was accused by the gay community of trying to change the subject or trying to deflect or conflating allegations with being gay which was never my intention’.

Spacey dabbed his eyes with a tissue as he said: ‘I would never have done anything to hurt the gay community and I was so upset that happened.

‘I have to own that. It’s my responsibility and I put it out there. It was really wrong and it was really bad and I’m deeply sorry’, bowing his head as he cried.

Spacey told the jury that he feared the story would aid conspiracy theorists who had already linked him to the late pedophile Jeffrey Epstein.

Spacey flew on Epstein’s private jet in 2002 on a trip to Africa with Bill Clinton along with the comedian Chris Tucker.

According to Spacey there were a ‘number of people on Twitter who were accusing me of being a pedophile’ because I flew to South Africa on a trip with President Clinton to raise money for AIDS, and in particular mothers with AIDS.’

He said the plane was ‘donated by a man named Jeffrey Epstein and I was now being talked about as if I knew Jeffrey Epstein and as if I was some important and powerful friend of his.’

Spacey had also been accused of going to Epstein’s private island in the Caribbean, which he told the jury was known as ‘Pedo Island.’

He said: ‘While it’s true I met Jeffrey Epstein on that trip I never saw him again and I have never been to an island.’

Spacey said he had also been linked to the Pizzagate conspiracy theory whose followers believe there is a ‘child sex ring being run out of a pizza parlor in Washington.’

He said: ‘They believe that I and Hillary Clinton and Anderson Cooper eat babies as part of it.’

With a laugh Spacey said the idea was ‘completely false’ but he feared Rapp’s allegation, given his age, could ‘add fuel to these already crazy ideas that were out there.’

Rapp was performing in ‘Precious Sons’ on Broadway in 1986 at 14 when he met Spacey, then 26.

Rapp testified that he was watching television on a bed in Spacey’s apartment after a party when a fully clothed Spacey entered the room, lifted him up like a groom carries a bride, laid him across the bed and climbed partially on top of him.

Rapp said he wriggled free and briefly went into a bathroom before fleeing the apartment, but not before Spacey followed him to the door and asked if he was sure he wanted to leave.

Rapp, an actor who appears in the TV series Star Trek: Discovery and was in the original cast of hit Broadway musical Rent, is seeking $40million from Spacey in damages in the civil case.

The trial is the first time a jury will decide on allegations against Spacey which were first made in the media by Rapp in 2017.  

As a result Spacey was fired from the Netflix series House of Cards and his legacy as the Oscar-winning star of films like American Beauty and The Usual Suspects has been stained.

Rapp originally sued Spacey in September 2020 for battery, intentional infliction of emotional distress and sexual assault.

The sexual assault claim was dismissed in June because it was beyond the statute of limitations.

In a statement on Twitter after Rapp first made his claims, he said that if the incident did happen then ‘I owe him the sincerest apology for what would have been deeply inappropriate drunken behavior.’

The case was brought through the law that temporarily lifted the statute of limitations on sex crimes that allowed Virginia Roberts to bring a now-settled case against Britain’s Prince Andrew earlier this year.

Another individual, identified only as CD, had also sued Spacey and also claimed he was sexually assaulted by the actor in the early in 1980s when he was 14.

CD claimed he first met Spacey when he was 12 when he was teaching a course in Westchester County outside of New York and CD was his student.

Spacey invited CD to his apartment where he ‘engaged in sexual acts including performing anal intercourse on (Spacey) and oral sex,’ a complaint stated.

CD’s case was thrown out in June last year after he refused to use his real name during court proceedings.

Judge Lewis Kaplan ruled that ‘the threat of significant media attention – however exacerbated by the modern era – alone does not entitle a plaintiff to the exceptional remedy of anonymity’

The case is far from the only claims against Spacey.

He due to face a criminal trial next year in London on five charges of sexual assault against three men, dating back 17 years, while he was artistic director of the Old Vic theatre.

Once that is concluded he faces a separate UK trial at the High Court in a lawsuit brought by one accuser seeking hundreds of thousands of pounds for ‘psychiatric damage’.

Born in New Jersey in 1959, Spacey studied at New York’s prestigious Juilliard School and made his professional stage debut in 1981.

He won a best supporting actor Oscar for his role in 1995’s The Usual Suspects and best actor for American beauty in 2000.

In 2015 he received an honorary knighthood and a special Olivier award for his contributions to British theatre.

He was accused of groping an 18-year-old at a bar in Massachusetts in 2016 but the case was dropped when the accuser refused to testify about a missing phone.

In August a judge in the US ruled he must pay $31million to MRC, the producers of House of Cards, for his firing in 2017.

Among the roles taken away from Spacey was oil tycoon J. Paul Getty in Ridley Scott’s All the Money in the World which was reshot using Christopher Plummer.

A Netflix biopic of Gore Vidal starring Spacey has been permanently shelved.

The trial comes on the fifth anniversary of the MeToo movement at a time when its momentum appears to be stalling after Johnny Depp’s defeat of Amber Heard in their defamation case earlier this year.

Harvey Weinstein is due to go on trial in Los Angeles later this month for rape and sexual assault allegations. He was jailed for 23 years in 2020 for similar crimes.