Yahoo News ‘Hard to Breathe’: Spacey Accuser Says Facing Him Is Brutal
Actor Anthony Rapp told jurors on Tuesday that seeing Kevin Spacey, who he has accused of sexually assaulting him when he was a teenager and is testifying against in a civil trial, is a daily struggle.
Rapp said that it’s so bad that even spotting Spacey in the security line prior to their Manhattan court proceedings felt “like being jolted with a cattle prod.”
“It was hard to breathe,” the 50-year-old Rent actor said on the stand, adding that the mere sight of Spacey made his “palms sweaty.”
Despite the “somewhat re-traumatizing” experience of retelling his allegations since he filed a $40 million civil lawsuit against Spacey in 2020, Rapp said he does not regret taking legal action against the House of Cards actor.
“I brought this lawsuit hoping that I maybe could help protect others,” Rapp said, prompting Judge Lewis Kaplan to immediately ask the court reporter to strike his statement from the record. (Spacey has been hit with a slew of sexual misconduct allegations but only those by Rapp are at issue in the trial.)
Spacey, who was watching Rapp throughout his testimony on Tuesday, turned away before the trial was called for a mid-morning break.
The revelation came on Rapp’s second day of testimony in a lawsuit against Spacey in Manhattan federal court. In the civil case, Rapp alleges that Spacey sexually assaulted him after a Manhattan party in 1986, when he was just 14 years old. Jurors will be tasked with deciding whether Spacey is liable for Rapp’s claims of battery and intentional infliction of emotional distress.
Rapp first made allegations against Spacey in a bombshell 2017 Buzzfeed article, spurring the actor to tweet a statement indicating he did not remember the alleged encounter while offering an apology “for what would have been deeply inappropriate drunken behavior.” But after Rapp came forward, several other individuals accused the House of Cards actor of misconduct or worse in cases going back decades and involving mostly young and underaged men.
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Spacey has denied all allegations of wrongdoing and seemingly dodged all legal repercussions in the United States (he faces a criminal case in the U.K.) for his actions—until Rapp’s trial. Spacey’s lawyers told jurors last week that the alleged party never even happened, and that Rapp made up the story because he was jealous of Spacey’s success.
In cross-examination, Spacey's attorney Jennifer Keller attempted to poke holes into every aspect of the allegations—and even the timeline of his decision to come forward.
Keller began by asking Rapp about his previous statements that he decided to speak to Buzzfeed upon reading a New York Times op-ed by Lupita Nyong’o about Harvey Weinstein. The lawyer pointed out that her column dropped five days after Rapp first reached out to journalist Adam Vary for the Spacey story.
“I was sharing my memory about how it happened,” Rapp responded.
As Keller continued, Rapp looked frazzled as the lawyer probed why his recollections of his night out with Spacey vastly differed from those of his friend and fellow actor John Barrowman. The grilling continued into Tuesday afternoon, as Keller berated Rapp with questions about whether he was jealous of Spacey’s “international success” and angry at the actor for not coming out as gay earlier in this career.
“Kevin Spacey’s star rose, and you were having trouble getting media attention, true?” Keller asked. Rapp responded: “That is not accurate.”
At least two jurors reacted visibly to Keller’s questioning, with one putting her head in her hand as he questioned Rapp about whether he threw one pencil or several pencils at a TV during that Tony awards in which Spacey made an appearance. Another was seen staring down at his notepad as Keller asked Rapp if he sold 26 CDs weeks after a college concert in the 1990s.
On Friday, Rapp said Spacey had invited him to a party in his Upper East Side apartment while he and his friend, Barrowman, were hanging out with the then-26-year-old Spacey after one of his plays. At the party, Rapp claimed that he was watching TV in another room when he suddenly saw a drunk Spacey “standing in the doorway,” his “eyes glassy and unfocused.”
The actor said that Spacey lifted him up “like a groom carrying a bride over the threshold” before climbing on top of him and pressing his penis on the teenager’s hip.
“It felt very wrong,” Rapp testified on Friday. “I didn’t want him to do it, and I had no reason that made any sense of why he would do it. I felt like a deer in headlights.”
After wiggling himself out from under Spacey and briefly hiding in the bathroom, Rapp said that he bolted for the front door. Before he was able to escape, he said Spacey stopped him and asked him, “Are you sure you want to leave?”
“I felt like he wanted me to stay,” Rapp said, adding that he quickly left Spacey’s Upper East Side apartment and returned to the apartment where he was staying with his mother.
Earlier Tuesday, Rapp—who currently stars in Star Trek: Discovery—stressed that during the encounter, he believed Spacey’s conduct was sexual in nature.
“I was thinking that he was trying to get with me sexually,” he said.
Several of Rapp’s friends testified last week that the actor told them about the incident years later, reiterating the consistency in the allegations over the last four decades.
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