Kevin Spacey made his first public appearance since sexual assault charges against him were dropped in July because his accuser refused to waive his 5th Amendment rights.
In his most bizarre piece of theater since he challenged the Nantucket sexual assault allegations in a weird video titled “Let Me Be Frank” uploaded to an unverified YouTube account in late December, Spacey treated a museum crowd to a dramatic reading that nobody asked for, after tipping off a few journalists that he would be doing it.
The Telegraph reports: “Spacey appeared in front of the Greek statue Boxer at Rest in Rome, to read Gabriele Tinti’s poem The Boxer, about an exhausted fighter used for entertainment then left bleeding by the ringside. … Standing beside the Greek bronze cast of the ravaged fighter, which dates from around 316 BC, Spacey, dressed in a tobacco-coloured suit, intoned the poem to a startled audience at the Palazzo Massimo alle Terme.”
The poem contains the lines “The more you’re wounded the greater you are. And the more empty you are. I have endured no end of sleepless nights. I have spent hours and hours sweating to destroy and fall,” and “They used me for their entertainment, fed on shoddy stuff. Life was over in a moment.”
In November 2018, an allegation against Spacey by actor Anthony Rapp snowballed into an avalanche of similar accusations including filmmaker Tony Montana, who said that Spacey groped him in public in 2003, and the actor Roberto Cavazos.
That was followed by an as yet unnamed man who claimed Spacey raped him at 15, the aforementioned sexual assault claim from 2017 on the island of Nantucket, and 8 crew members on House of Cards who said they were harassed by Spacey as well as a London bartender who said Spacey flashed him and then tried to shut him up with an expensive watch. Fellow actor Guy Pearce also said Spacey had once been “handsy” with him.
Spacey was subsequently dumped by his agency, CAA, his publicist Polaris, and also by Netflix.
In July 2018, it emerged that London’s Metropolitan Police were investigating three new claims of sexual assault by Spacey. Those investigations are continuing.
