Radar Online
Kevin Spacey will have to cough up nearly four dozen personal emails sent between him and his team after a judge sided with the actor's sexual assault accuser Anthony Rapp.
According to legal order obtained by Radar, Judge Lewis A. Kaplan has ordered the Baby Driver actor to produce 45 emails sent in 2017. The correspondence took place between Spacey, his manager, PR people, media consultants, and his lawyers when they were in crisis mode after being notified that Buzzfeed was publishing Rapp's allegations.
Judge Kaplan ruled the emails do not fall under attorney-client privilege. “None is a communication between the defendant [Spacey] and his lawyers without one of more of the manager and the PR people at least copied on the email,” the documents read. “Such communications are not lawyer-client communications made in confidence and/or generated for litigation.”
The email chain allegedly began on October 29, 2017, when “a reporter emailed one of the defendant's PR people and one of his lawyers to the effect that Buzzfeed, an Internet site, was about to run a story reporting Rapp's assertion that the defendant made a sexual advance on him in 1986 when Rapp was 14 years old.”
In the documents, the judge observed that Buzzfeed's email “triggered” a firestorm between “the defendant, his manager, his two lawyers, and the two PR people concerning whether to respond and, if so, what to say.”
The judge pointed out it appeared Spacey and his team were more concerned about the PR nightmare and saving his image than having the actor's lawyers take the reigns.
Spacey, his manager, and PR consultants were “seeking and providing the business and reputational advice that those experts long had provided to the defendant with respect to his career,” Judge Kaplan states.
“The lawyers were involved principally to raise the alarm if the lay advisers or the defendant proposed going down a path that might expose the defendant to, or increase already existing legal exposure.”
He concluded his legal order by stating the emails “were not generated primarily for litigation but instead reflect a discussion of public relations strategy,” adding, “Their communications therefore are not protected by attorney-client privilege.”
Rapp sued Spacey for sexual assault in September 2020 after claiming the actor made a sexual advance on him in 1986 when he was just 14 years old.
