Yahoo News Kevin Spacey to Stand Trial in U.K., Again, Over Sexual Assault Civil Claim (Report)
Kevin Spacey is due to stand trial in the U.K. again, likely in 2025, over a lawsuit by a man, who alleges that the actor sexually assaulted him, Reuters reported.
The alleged sexual assault took place in August 2008, with the trial on Tuesday expected to start in early 2025, Reuters reported. The actor has denied the allegations.
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The claimant has been granted anonymity by the court, but Reuters said he is one of four complainants who separately sued Spacey in criminal cases, the trial of which ended with the actor’s acquittal last summer.
Earlier this year, a judge granted the unnamed claimant in the civil case “judgment in default,” meaning a ruling in his favor without a trial, after Spacey’s legal team missed a deadline to formally submit a defense. A judge on Tuesday overturned that decision; Spacey didn’t attend the court date. “The defendant’s solicitors have made an error,” the judge said, according to Reuters. “In my view, that error should not be visited upon the defendant.”
The civil claim, which was originally filed in July 2022, was put on hold until the outcome of the criminal trial against the star. In the summer of 2023, Spacey was acquitted of several sexual assault charges in a high-profile criminal trial in London. A jury found him not guilty of nine charges, including sexual assault and indecent assault, following allegations by four men. The charges were dated between 2001 and 2013, most relating to the period when the two-time Oscar winner was the artistic director of London’s Old Vic Theatre, a position he held from 2004 to 2015.
The news of another U.K. trial follows the airing this weekend of a new Channel 4 documentary that offered a “forensic look” at the Oscar winner’s rise to stardom and his alleged sexual misconduct. Spacey Unmasked featured 10 men telling their stories of alleged abuse at the hands of Spacey. None of them were involved in the London criminal trial, and all but one have never spoken out before.
“I will not sit back and be attacked by a dying network’s one-sided ‘documentary’ about me in their desperate attempt for ratings,” Spacey said in a long thread on X, formerly Twitter, before the weekend. He also said about the doc that will air on Max and Investigation Discovery in the U.S.: “There’s a proper channel to handle allegations against me and it’s not Channel 4. Each time I have been given the time and a proper forum to defend myself, the allegations have failed under scrutiny and I have been exonerated.”
“I’ve got nothing left to hide,” Spacey also told former U.K. broadcaster Dan Wootton during a two-hour, 20-minute interview entitled Kevin Spacey: Right of Reply, which streamed on X (formerly Twitter).
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