CNN
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Kevin Spacey will return to another courtroom on Thursday as jury selection begins in a civil lawsuit brought by actor Anthony Rapp.
Rapp, best known for his role in “Star Trek: Discovery,” sued Spacey in 2020 for assault, battery and intentionally inflicting emotional distress.
In 2017, Rapp first publicly alleged that in 1986 Spacey made a sexual advance on him when Rapp was 14 when they were both performing in Broadway shows.
The suit accuses Spacey of groping Rapp’s butt and Spacey of placing the then-teen on a bed and putting his body partially on top of Rapp’s.
Spacey publicly apologized shortly after Rapp’s revelation, tweeting that he was “beyond horrified to hear her story” and said he didn’t remember the encounter.
“…If I then behaved as he describes, I owe him the most sincere apologies for what would have been deeply inappropriate drunken behavior, and I am sorry for the feelings he describes having carried with him all these years,” Spacey said in his tweet. at the time.
Chase Scolnick, an attorney for Spacey, said in a statement to CNN that he expects Spacey to be vindicated at trial.
“We look forward to seeing Mr. Rapp’s claims tried in front of an impartial jury rather than on social media, and we hope Mr. Spacey will be vindicated,” Scolnick said.
U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan will preside over the trial.
As the Me Too movement in 2017 began to encourage victims of sexual misconduct to speak publicly about allegations of abuse by powerful figures, stories began to surface about Spacey’s alleged inappropriate behavior.
A Massachusetts man has alleged Spacey groped him when he was an 18-year-old bus boy at a restaurant in Nantucket. A criminal complaint claimed the waiter told police Spacey bought him a number of booze, unzipped the accuser’s pants and rubbed his penis, inside and outside his pants , for about three minutes.
Prosecutors eventually dropped the criminal case against Spacey, after the accuser pleaded fifth in the witness box after being questioned about his missing cellphone and possible deletion of text messages.
In addition to the civil trial in Manhattan, Spacey also faces criminal charges in England.
Spacey was charged with four counts of sexual assault against three men and one count of causing a person to engage in penetrative sexual activity without their consent by the UK Public Prosecutor’s Office in May.
The charges relate to two alleged incidents in London in 2005, two more in 2008 and another incident in Gloucestershire, west of England, in 2013. The alleged victim of the 2005 incidents is now in his 40s, while both men believed to have been involved in the 2008 and 2013 incidents are now in their 30s, London Metropolitan Police said.
Spacey pleaded not guilty to the charges.
Shortly after a 2017 CNN investigation revealed that several current and former members of the Netflix series “House of Cards” production team alleged that Spacey had harassed them, Netflix cut ties with the actor.
In December 2018, Spacey posted a video on his Twitter account speaking as his “House of Cards” character Frank Underwood. The character was killed off on the show after Spacey was fired.
“Of course, some believed it all and waited impatiently to hear me confess everything,” he said in the character’s southern accent. “They’re dying to get me to declare that everything said is true and that I got what I deserved. Wouldn’t it be easy if everything was so simple? Only you and I know that it is not so simple, neither in politics nor in life.
“But you wouldn’t believe the worst without proof, would you?” You wouldn’t rush into a judgment without facts, would you? Have you?” he said.
Last year, Spacey was ordered to pay nearly $31 million to Media Rights Capital, the production company behind the show.
He was cast in the Italian film “The Man Who Drew God,” his first project since the allegations surfaced in 2017, which is currently in post-production, according to Imdb.