Kevin Spacey testified in a New York courtroom Monday that he never made a sexual pass at the actor Anthony Rapp, who has sued, claiming the Academy Award-winning actor tried to take him to bed when he was 14.
Identifying himself as “Kevin Spacey Fowler,” the actor was asked about Rapp’s claims that a then-26-year-old Spacey picked him up like a groom does a bride after a 1986 party and put him on his bed before lying on top of him.
Rapp testified earlier in the trial that he squirmed out from underneath Spacey in the fully clothed encounter before fleeing the apartment, only to have Spacey follow him to the door and ask if he was sure he wanted to leave.
“They are not true,” Spacey said of the allegations.
Then he was asked if he has been private about his personal life over his career.
“I work in a very complicated family dynamic,” he said, saying rants by his white supremacist and neo-Nazi father when he was a youngster led him to hate bigotry and intolerance.
Spacey said his father’s mind was likely damaged during unemployment resulting from an unsuccessful quest to be a creative writer.
“My father was a white supremacist and neo-Nazi,” Spacey said. “It meant that my siblings and I were forced to listen to hours and hours of my father lecturing us about his beliefs.”
He said it was when “my hatred of bigotry and intolerance began.”
Spacey called it “humiliating and terrifying when friends came over to the house” because he was never sure what his father might say to them or to him.
“Everything about what was happening in that house was something I had to keep to myself. We never, ever, talked about it. I have never talked about these things publicly ever,” he said.
As Spacey became interested in theater, he said, he endured the screams of his father who “used to yell at me at the idea that I might be gay.”
Spacey’s testimony began two hours after Judge Lewis A. Kaplan threw out a claim of intentional infliction of emotional distress after lawyers for Rapp finished their presentation of evidence. Kaplan said elements of the claim duplicate Rapp’s claim that he was a victim of assault and battery.
Spacey’s lawyer argued for dismissal of the case on the grounds that Rapp’s attorneys had failed to prove his claims.
Kaplan said the trial can proceed with assault and battery claims asserted by Rapp, a 50-year-old regular on “Star Trek: Discovery” on television. He was part of the original Broadway cast of “Rent.”
Spacey, 63, was an Oscar-winning actor popular on the Netflix series “House of Cards” when claims by Rapp and others in 2017 abruptly derailed his career.
Rapp was performing in “Precious Sons” on Broadway in 1986 when he met Spacey.
Rapp testified over several days earlier in the trial, which entered its third week on Monday.
—Tom Hays And Larry Neumeister, The Associated Press
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