Earlier this year, Kevin Spacey’s attorneys sought the quashing of a 2020 arbitration ruling that required the actor to pay House of Cards producer MRC nearly $31 million for his alleged sexual misconduct behind the scenes. scene from the hit Netflix series. The lawyers alleged that there were only “sexual innuendos” and “innocent games” that did not violate company policies. This Thursday, the judge of the Los Angeles Superior Court, Mel Red Recana, confirmed that conviction.
Spacey was one of the protagonists of the series based on the tensions, intrigues and betrayals that are handled in the highest spheres of power. There, he played Frank Underwood, the President of the United States, but during the sixth season, after facing accusations that he had sexually assaulted and abused young men, he ended up being kicked off the series.
As it turned out at the time, one of the alleged victims was a production assistant who claimed that Spacey groped him. Faced with these accusations, the producer decided to start an investigation whose result was decisive in deciding the actor’s dismissal.
In his plea, MRC claimed that Spacey caused a millionaire loss when his misconduct forced them to fire him and shorten the sixth season. The arbitrator found those arguments valid and found that the performer’s behavior constituted a material breach of his agreements as actor and executive producer. Therefore, he ordered the payment of 29.5 million dollars in damages and another 1.5 million to cover costs and fees.
Those were not the first accusations of inappropriate behavior that the protagonist of the series faced. In a 2017 Buzzfeed article, actor Anthony Rapp alleged that Spacey had made a sexual advance on him in 1986, when Rapp was just 14 years old. Two days later, CNN aired a report accusing Spacey of creating a “toxic” environment on set by making rude comments and touching young male staff members without consent. That same day, production of House of Cards was suspended.
After reviewing all the material, both the network news report and the internal investigation, the arbitrator found that Spacey violated MRC’s sexual harassment policy with respect to five members of the House of Cards staff. Furthermore, he found that MRC “made a direct damages claim based on hard numbers,” and that they “were appropriately conservative and based almost entirely on MRC’s actual costs and contracted revenue.”
This is not the only cause facing Spacey. In May, he was charged with four counts of sexual assault and one count of “causing a person to engage in non-consensual penetrative sexual activity” by the UK Crown Prosecution Service (CPS), after analyzing for more than a year the material obtained by the Metropolitan Police.
The events that brought Spacey to court would have occurred between 2005 and 2013, when he was artistic director of the prestigious Old Vic theater in London. The victims of four of them are three men, in their 30s and 40s today. In mid-July of this year, Spacey pleaded not guilty at the time of being notified of the charges and will await the beginning of the process, scheduled for June 6, 2023.
In addition, a federal court in New York set the start of the open process for October 4 based on the complaint by Anthony Rapp, who claims that he was 14 years old when Spacey invited him to his house after a party and sexually assaulted him. a way that still causes him a picture of “extreme emotional anguish”. In 2017, as soon as the accusation was known, the actor excused himself saying that he had no memory of the episode (which occurred in 1986). He publicly apologized for what, in his view, was the result of “deeply inappropriate behavior stemming from an intoxicated situation.”