This programme contains strong language, scenes of graphic movie
violence and discussions of a sexual nature that some viewers may find distressing
The very first scene of Netflix's House of Cards just blew me away.
TYRES SCREECHING
CRASH
There's this crash and Kevin's character,
he's this powerful politician.
He just runs outside of his house to see what happened.
DOG WHINING AND YELPING
Sh.
There are two kinds of pain...
The sort of pain that makes you strong, or useless pain.
Sort of pain that's only suffering.
I have no patience for useless things.
DOG YELPS
It gives me goose bumps every time I watch it.
His acting in the scene is incredible, and when I got
the call that I was going to be on the show, I thought, "Oh, my God."
I was 23 years old when I started House of Cards.
I was young, I was naive, and I got a great opportunity.
I was like, if I get to work with Kevin Spacey,
like, that is...that is awesome, that is so cool.
Fortunately, I was lucky enough to be part of Underwood's Secret
Service, so that was Kevin Spacey's detail.
He would crack a couple jokes and I would laugh.
He was a very funny guy.
I told him I had a girlfriend.
He told me that he loved jazz music and I just thought
he was very friendly, outgoing.
I absolutely was still intimidated...
..with, uh, the way that he carried himself.
I mean, the value of that one person can have
and just to see that person walking around, he's worth millions.
Every now and then, they'd let us know that there's a speaking role
for a Secret Service agent.
I was honoured to be chosen.
My whole body's tingling.
I can feel that I'm sweating.
I'm thinking, "This is my time, this is my moment."
They said, "Action."
What if we don't send ships? Just make a strong statement...
I came in, I walked up to him.
We still have to offer the Chinese an incentive to...
I whisper in his ear and he gave me this look like, "Oh, my God."
..contingency plans in place.
Already drafted.
And then we just walked off set together.
We do this little U-turn, and then we're on the other side
of the set and it's just me and him.
I leaned in because he was saying something to me, and then I felt
something like something tickled me just right below my zipper.
And I was like, "What?"
I looked down and I see it's his finger.
You know, his hand touched my penis.
Wasn't like us playing around in the locker room,
a little joke or a little tap.
It was...it was sexual.
I was touched, I was inappropriately touched on set at work.
He just had these real dead eyes looking at me, and I just felt
like I was staring into, like, a soulless...monster.
And I'm just kind of, like, in shock, like, "Wait, what?
"That's not cool."
You know, you hear, "Cut," and then boom, reset.
Go right-back to doing the scenes again.
I remember feeling this overwhelming sense of guilt
because I just felt like it was my fault.
And I just felt so, like, disgusted with myself.
That was the greatest day, you know, on set for me.
And it very quickly turned sour when I realised, like,
if I potentially have to keep working with this guy and I get
more lines, is this something that I'm going to experience
on a regular basis, and what power do I have?
The Oscar-winning actor Kevin Spacey has appeared in court in London,
accused of sexual offences against four men
between 2001 and 2013.
The prosecutor claimed the Hollywood actor was a sexual bully.
Kevin Spacey has told a court in London that he is a big flirt,
but he denied behaving aggressively.
The actor broke down in tears as he was cleared
of all nine charges.
I would like to say that I'm enormously grateful to the jury
for having taken the time to examine all of the evidence,
and I am humbled by the outcome today.
The star leaves court an innocent man.
He will hope he can resume a career that reached the highest levels.
I was dancing with the devil.
I wouldn't see it as anything criminal.
I just did think it was just kind of, like, disgusting behaviour
from a professional to have on set.
It was cold in a way that almost was inhuman.
Men aren't supposed to let this get under their skin.
So I went to Chatsworth High School with Kevin.
I would have been 16, 17 at the time.
It was all about, "I can do this, I can do this to you.
"I'm Kevin Spacey."
I'm lost.
I have no idea where I am.
I really don't.
Ha!
Yeah, this place has changed a lot.
And then there it is, Sunny Brae Avenue.
This is the house in Canoga Park where my brother
Kevin and I lived.
Yeah, there is the old bedroom window.
This is baby Kevin and myself dressed up in a sailor's outfit.
From that young age, we had a real bond as brothers.
You know, we used to play outside and just run
around with the neighbours.
We used to play in the fields and hide in the grass
and play kick the can.
Those are some really fond memories.
My father, he blamed the world for all of his problems.
And he was full of so much hatred and...
..he said that the Holocaust never happened.
He used to have these Nazi meetings at the house.
In my father's office, he used to have a big Nazi flag
hanging up on the wall.
My father had a riding crop.
And he used to beat the shit out of me.
Looking at it from my brother's perspective, all he saw was Randy
got into trouble a lot and he would just split.
I never saw my father ever lay a hand on my brother, ever.
But Kevin didn't have a normal childhood.
He just found a way to survive in an environment
that was not a loving family.
And I think acting was a way for him to escape where he came from.
You make a decision that you don't need to graduate from Juilliard.
You'll just take your life into your own hands, right?
After two years. Yeah. Yeah.
Although I do believe that if I hadn't left,
they probably would have asked me to leave about four days later.
I had no prospects, I had no agent, I had no money.
But I thought I was ready to start.
This is a Teenage Idol cattle call.
Why do you want to be a Teenage Idol?
I want to act very badly, and that's just a... It's part of it, you know?
It's like I do an impression of Johnny Carson,
it's not really what I do.
This was 1981.
I was working at the Public Theatre.
It was a wonderful time in my life.
Being in New York post college, I was comfortably out
of the closet for the first time.
I had a boyfriend, and I just sort of felt like New York
was in front of me.
Kevin was around the theatre a lot.
He was doing Free Shakespeare in Central Park,
so there was a production that was in rehearsal.
I was a spear carrier in my very first Shakespeare job
as a professional in New York, out of Juilliard.
And I played a tavern person.
I played a guard, a spear carrier, and I think a rock.
And which was your finest?
I think the rock was. LAUGHTER
He was this presence, you know, very vague, vague presence.
But he came into the office to use the guest desk,
and that's how I encountered him.
I was on the phone and Kevin Spacey walked in.
He didn't acknowledge me, he didn't look at me.
And I finished up my call and hung up and looked over at him.
And he still wasn't acknowledging me, and I thought,
"I should say hello, shouldn't he say hello?
"Am I interrupting?" Or whatever.
So I stood up and then he stood up...
..uh, and, uh...
..began to approach and the...
There was nothing really odd about that, except for the abject
silence when he was standing and walking,
he was wearing a pair of pretty tight jeans.
He had a full scale erection.
And he kept approaching and came in front of me and pulled me
up onto the desk.
So I lost my balance, went back on the desk and he was on top of me
and he's pressing against me.
It was just completely out of the blue and completely wordless.
Angry.
There was no eye contact.
There was nothing but force, physical force.
And I'm pushing him off, saying, "Get off me,
"this is my office."
And he persisted before I was able to push him enough
that he rolled off.
He stood back up.
He grabbed his coat and he stormed out of the office,
slamming the door behind him.
I sat in my office for I don't know how long, and I was shaking.
It was cold in a way that almost was inhuman.
I was really scared.
I never told my boyfriend of the time.
I never felt I could tell or should tell anybody.
It was something I needed to bury.
I had to watch his career blossom and now he's gaining
even more power.
If he could do that to me back when he had no power,
what's he going to do with that now?
What's he going to do with that anger?
I sort of thought, well, most of the actors I admired
really made their marks in theatre.
And then Hollywood came knocking.
So I thought, well, let me just try to do that.
Kevin Spacey kind of erupted in the '90s into being
this huge star, super fast.
How many films released in 1995?
Uh, four, Outbreak. Outbreak.
That was the first and Swimming with Sharks.
The Usual Suspects. Usual Suspects.
And a little film we did called Seven.
I mean, does it get any better than '95?
I'm an entertainment journalist.
Part of what I do now is more investigative in nature.
So, you know, in the '90s, there were a few examples
of Kevin Spacey bringing a woman with him to certain events.
There was no such thing as an out gay actor
at the level of Kevin Spacey.
Closest you could get was Rupert Everett, who looked stunningly
handsome and, by all rights, should have had a very robust career.
But he didn't.
Ellen DeGeneres came out in '97, you know,
in real life and on her sitcom.
For several years, her career kind of bottomed out
and she could not get much work.
And again, that was seen as an
example of why maybe coming out
at that level was not a good career move.
Besides, it was fun.
I got to make like I was notorious.
The Usual Suspects really launched Kevin Spacey as an actor in a way
that is hard to describe for somebody who wasn't
necessarily alive at the time.
There was this whole campaign about who is Keyser Soze,
this mythic gangster?
..burns down the houses they live in.
And because the entire movie hinges on your ability to buy
into Kevin Spacey's performance at every moment, that really launched
Kevin Spacey as this actor who an audience couldn't ever quite trust
but always wanted to watch.
So, when Kevin Spacey won his first Oscar for The Usual Suspects...
And the Oscar is presented to Kevin Spacey in The Usual Suspects.
CHEERING AND APPLAUSE
Well, whoever Keyser Soze is, I can tell you he's going to get
gloriously drunk tonight.
It really was an announcement for Kevin Spacey
as really having reached a sort of new pinnacle in the industry.
In 1998, Kevin's cool, kind of punk rock.
I'd come from a job working for George Lucas in post-production,
and the last film I worked on was Saving Private Ryan.
A friend of mine was in town, he was a singer of
a pretty big band, and we ended up going to The Viper Room that night.
Kevin Spacey's there, he wants to meet the band.
So, of course, I was over the moon to meet him, you know?
To me, he was just on such a pedestal.
I'm not going to lie, I was starstruck.
Like, we just boom, like, hit it off.
Like off to the races.
I was telling him about I went to film school
after I got out of the Marine Corps.
And, you know, I was kind of throwing my hat
in the ring as an actor.
You know, he wanted to get my headshot and resume
and that we should potentially work together.
It felt amazing to have somebody in the industry talk to me like that,
somebody that's going to take you under their wing.
I was like, I can't even believe this.
Like, I'm a nobody.
So we leave The Viper Room and, you know, we just transferred
the whole party to this big fancy house in the Hollywood Hills.
Kevin came up to me at one point and he said, "Hey, there's
"a great home theatre in this house, and you should check it out."
So I go with him upstairs, and that's when things...
I started to feel the energy shift a little bit.
And, uh, and he was like, "Can I have a hug?"
I was like, "Huh, OK."
I guess that's an LA thing.
I did not know at that point that he was gay.
So I kind of go into, you know, give him a quick bro hug and, uh,
and he just, you know, gets me in this bear grip and he's kind of,
you know, rubbing his, his whiskery face in my neck and, um, you know,
kind of grinding into me, like, humping me.
Just like, "Hey, whoa, man, like, you met my girlfriend."
Like, you know, "You know, she's downstairs, like,
"that's not cool."
And he's like, "No, no, no, it's OK, it's fine, you're OK.
"You're good, don't freak out."
I was like, "Dude, you know, I was a marine, right?"
And he goes, "Yeah, that's half the attraction."
I remember going down those stairs and, like, being kind of shaky,
you know, on my feet.
My heart was racing, full-on adrenaline dump.
I've thought about what he meant by saying, "It's OK," a lot
over the years, because it is a strange sort of thing
to say in a moment like that.
Is he talking to me? Is he talking to himself?
Did this happen to him at some point in his life?
And he's sort of - like, that's what the person said to him?
Shush him and soothe him over by using those words.
We have gotten so into a kind of confessional in the last ten years
of everybody sort of coming out and talking about their lives,
I think it's, um, for me, it's not something
I'm interested in doing and not a line that I will ever cross.
I haven't done a lot of publicity.
I've kept it very close to my chest, and that's important.
I was just kind of nursing a hangover and the phone rings
like, "Hello, Scotter?"
Scotter?
And I recognise the voice, "Kevin?"
He's like, "We should get together and I'll get
"your headshot and resume."
You know, this wasn't just some guy, this was Kevin freaking Spacey.
And you do it happily, uh, with joy in your heart.
"Thank you, God!"
Like, he really does care about my career.
And there he was, standing on the corner.
Right on that corner there's a movie theatre,
and, um, Saving Private Ryan happened to be playing.
So he's like, "Hey, your movie, we should go see it."
So I had this intuition that this thing could go sideways
in a myriad of ways, but I also still was very much
under the impression that I was in control.
Kevin grabbed a seat, like, way up high, very hidden, very private.
And I'm watching the movie.
The first 20 minutes of the invasion of Normandy.
Like, it's shockingly, you know, horrific.
There's a guy picking up his arm and people are on fire, and people
are just dying in really the most horrible ways
you can die, like.
RAPID GUNFIRE
SHOUTS AND SCREAMS ON MOBILE
All of a sudden, there's some activity happening next to me
and kind of glance over and...
..Kevin's just pleasuring himself.
You know, some of the most horrific war footage ever recreated.
Like, there's no way that this is happening,
that this guy is rubbing one out during the invasion of Normandy.
And finally he reaches over and grabs my hand,
and tries to get me to...to help out.
I was like, "No! This is crazy!"
Every single guy you tell this story to
tells you a whole story, right, of what they would have done.
"Oh, I would have punched him in the face,
"and I would have kicked him, and I..."
And I'm like, "No. Actually, no. No, you wouldn't have."
Guys like myself, like, you just really don't find yourself
in those situations.
So, it's so shocking. And, I can only speak for myself,
but your first reaction is not violence.
It's... You feel like you did something wrong,
you brought it on to yourself and...
..you feel shame.
HE SIGHS
Here's my mother and father, and Kevin.
And Kevin's got a face that's like, "Eeeh!"
The house was creepy.
It was cold.
It was violent.
So, I think for both me and Kevin,
any time we could get out of the house,
we were out of there.
I think that my outfits that I wear,
and that I have been wearing...
..for the last 50 years are like costumes.
It makes me feel comfortable and...
..accepted.
Another way to mask my internal pain and suffering
that I was going through psychologically.
That if I look different and I dress different...
..maybe people would never be able to find out
about my dark secret, and maybe they would treat me better.
And it takes me farther and farther away from where I came from.
And that...that makes me happy.
I remember my favourite class at Juilliard was mask class,
and when you put a mask on your face
and stand in front of a mirror,
you suddenly don't see yourself.
You see something else,
and suddenly you become free.
It was so revealing to hear him hint
that his acting in some ways served
the same purpose as my costumes.
I started getting phone calls from Kevin.
You know, they were never like, "Hey, come in for a casting,"
or anything like that.
It was always sort of like, "Hey, pack your stuff,
"we're going to Maui.
"I have a room booked for us.
"I'm at LAX right now. I'm waiting for you.
"I'm at the Beverly Hills Hotel, sitting in front of a fire,
"petting my black lab."
Didn't return any of those.
And then, finally, he got me.
He calls and he's like, "Hey, Bruce Willis is having a party tonight.
"There's people there I want to introduce you to."
And I'm like, "Oh, freaking Die Hard!
"Oh, my God!
"Ah, I want to meet Bruce!"
So, I go to the hotel,
I go up in the elevator.
The TV's on
and, at one point, he turns the volume off,
and it's like two characters talking the scene,
and he starts doing the voices of the characters and accents.
And it's the funniest thing.
Like, I'm rolling.
Like, it's hilarious.
Of course, time is passing,
and I'm, like, "When are we going to the party?"
And this was when he started sort of letting me know, you know,
in no uncertain terms, that there's a glass ceiling in Hollywood.
He was moving around in the back and rubbing my shoulders,
and, you know...
And...if you don't pay the toll,
you know, your sexual favours,
you know, you'll...you'll have a...you'll have a decent career,
but you're not going to have your name in lights, kind of thing.
It really affected me on a level that I never could have seen coming.
The betrayal aspect of thinking that
somebody thought you had something to offer the industry,
and that you...
..were a person of value.
There is a humiliation that goes along with...with being
sort of treated like that, objectified like that.
You're being looked at as an object,
um, that you have nothing else to offer the world.
And I hope that people can...can look at this and say,
"Well, you know, that guy, if he can tell his story
"and, you know, he kind of seems like maybe he's this tough guy
"that...that can handle a lot.
"But if...if he can show this level of vulnerability,
"you know, maybe I can, too."
And that would be a good first place to start healing.
Fuck!
HE SIGHS
Goddamn it!
Fuck.
HE BREATHES SHAKILY
Sorry.
HE CLEARS HIS THROAT
Well, that's what I wanted to avoid.
HE CHUCKLES
I don't want this to be a fucking victim thing.
You know?
HE CLEARS HIS THROAT AND SNIFFS
I, er... No, it's important to me.
Strength is important to me.
It has been my whole life.
Men aren't supposed to let this get under their skin.
REPORTER: At age 40,
he's anything but your typical movie star.
SPACEY: It's also quite anonymous
because people don't look at the person on the scooter,
they look at the scooter.
You don't want anybody to see behind the mask of Kevin Spacey?
I've always believed that the longer an actor remains in the shadows,
then the characters emerge.
I think there was at least a contingent of people
in the industry who had a tacit understanding
that Kevin Spacey was actually gay
or, at the very least, bisexual.
Kevin Spacey was asked a couple times about it
where he basically said, "It's just something I will never discuss."
And then there was a profile in Esquire magazine,
with the headline, "Kevin Spacey has a secret."
At the time,
that was seen as outing him.
His team was furious about that piece and
sort of considered it an invasion of privacy.
I think when you get into the world of entertainment
and entertainers who are closeted,
the idea of outing them as some sort of public good
just doesn't really stand up to me.
I think where things get tricky is when an LGBTQ person is behaving
in such a way that causes harm
or hardship to other people.
So, I was in all the school plays
and musicals and drama camp.
I was the drama nerd, for sure,
and then wanted to come out to Los Angeles,
but it was too far for my mom.
So I ended up in New York
on this internship on The Big Kahuna.
It was the only time I worked in a production where I was not paid.
And it was almost like it was like an honour to work
on a Kevin Spacey movie.
So, everybody was bowing to him.
I mean, he was running the show.
The first time he approached me, he kidnapped me.
He said, "I'm kidnapping you
"up to my dressing room to run lines with me."
Getting to run lines with him felt like this is a dream come true.
By the second week, he would kidnap me off set to run lines,
and he would just have the TV on and wouldn't be interested
in running any lines. And he would complain about a sore shoulder
and wanted me to rub his shoulder.
And then he'd be lying on his couch,
and he'd try to put my hand on his crotch.
He was clearly trying to get me to, like, do sexual things.
You know, touch me, and I would, you know, carefully move him away.
And I would always insert, like,
I had a long-term girlfriend at the time.
But, you know, it felt like a sexual conquest
that, because I was straight, it was more of a challenge,
and that, you know, it's the chase.
And that went on pretty much till the end of the shoot.
I remember hearing, "Well, yeah, everybody knows
"if you don't want to go home with Kevin,
"don't be the last guy in a bar with him."
And I guess, you know, I could have walked away at that point,
and I felt like, you know, I wanted to be in his good favour.
And if all that meant was rubbing his shoulders, I would do that.
On our last day of filming, we were in the bar drinking
and I get up to pee and he goes,
"Do you want to smoke some weed?"
I was like, "All right." And so he follows me into the bathroom.
He's in between me and the door,
and he just whips out his dick and shoves his tongue in my mouth,
and he wanted to finish.
And, um...
How am I going to get out of this?
That moment, somebody started banging on the bathroom door.
He got very nervous, zipped up his pants, bolted out of the bar.
I remember my mom saying
that I should call the National Enquirer
and, like, you know, blow the story.
And I remember telling her, like, "Mom, I'll never work in Hollywood
"if I do that." You know, like, "It'll ruin me!"
I was in shock for months.
But then I was like, "OK, so that's how Hollywood is."
REPORTER: Now Spacey is back with a new film called American Beauty.
The reviews, they're over the top.
Steven Spielberg says one of the best films he's seen in ten years.
It's why he wants to make movies.
Welcome back. Thank you.
I remember just being bowled over by that entire film.
And at its heart was this sort of everyman performance
by Kevin Spacey.
Lester, could you make me a little later, please,
because I'm not quite late enough?
A man who has the sort of sad sack suburban life,
and feels very beaten down,
and over the course of the movie,
kind of reclaims his own sense of self and his own sense of purpose.
CROWDS CHEER
PRESENTER: And the Oscar goes to
Kevin Spacey in American Beauty.
REPORTER: This is Kevin Spacey's second Academy Award.
He won an Oscar in 1995
for his supporting role in The Usual Suspects.
It really made clear, him winning those Oscars so close together,
just how meteoric a rise Kevin Spacey had had within the industry,
and I think with audiences in general.
To my friends, for pointing out my worst qualities...
..I know you do it because you love me.
And that's why I loved playing Lester.
Because we got to see all of his worst qualities,
and we still grew to love him.
It's Kevin Spacey at full-tilt power mode.
He brings up his faults and all the people that have told him
about his faults, and that makes him a better person.
What is that about?
REPORTER: Travis Aaron Wade.
Yeah, I just finished a film last year with John Travolta.
I spent some time in the Marine Corps.
It felt very difficult to shake, getting back as a civilian.
My mom asked me a simple question.
What do you love? And I said, movies.
And I was at the Golden Globes,
all the glitz and the glam.
My publicist was great.
We, you know, we have the champagne in hand,
and she's like, "All right, so this is where you network.
And I look over and it's Kevin Spacey.
And he clearly was waving at me, like he knew me.
The walk to Kevin was slow motion.
You just felt like you were getting pulled in.
First thing he says to me is,
"Who are you?"
I said, "Oh, I'm Travis Wade."
And him and I just started laughing immediately.
And he goes, "Do you want to go outside and smoke a joint?"
If it was anybody else,
I would have been like, "Nah, I don't really smoke weed."
But now you're standing opposite of this actor
who at this point now is basically at the top of the game.
He was somewhat known as like the mayor of Hollywood.
And I remember it was that moment where there's a point
in American Beauty with Wes Bentley and him,
where they're out back smoking.
Well, my dad interferes less in my life when I pretend
to be an upstanding young citizen with a respectable job.
Lester.
I'm choking.
We're belly laughing.
We've got our hands on each other's shoulder.
Honey, this is Ricky Fitts.
This is Ricky Fitts...
And, literally, I just felt like I've just got a new best friend.
He looks at me and he's like, there's a party tonight.
It's at my hotel.
And you,
I would love to come as my guest.
I was really, at that point in my life,
looking for a mentor in the industry,
and I extremely trusted that I may have just found one.
He said, you know, come up around midnight.
And I go up to the top floor at the penthouse.
The door opens, and there he is.
It's Kevin.
He's in a bathrobe with a Scotch, with a joint.
There is nobody there but us.
And I go, "Uh, are you...? Are you sure people are coming?"
He goes, yeah, people come in, they come out. I'll let them in,
and the party gets going as the night goes on,
and sit, sit, sit, sit.
Then he started asking me questions about my career
and what I'd been working on, and I told him the projects that
I had booked and my experience and my military.
And he loved the fact that I was US Marine.
And I...I just remember looking at him.
In his eyes, there's a thing that just draws you into Kevin,
just like that snake from Jungle Book.
And I just remember just going,
"Like, listen, I probably should get going."
His face just went very straight.
He's like, "No. Stay."
And I said, "I'm not gay. I've never been with a man."
He goes, "Even better."
He goes, "Oh, darling, there's nothing like flipping.
"There's nothing like flipping a US Marine who looks like you.
"Come on, take your shirt off."
And I was like, "Oh, boy!"
It wasn't a fear that physically I was going to be raped.
It was more of a fear that if I don't leave here in a good light...
..this could cost me my career.
He put his arm against the door, and he - krr - locked it.
And in that moment, I knew I was in a sell-your-soul situation...
..because this was something that I did not want to do...
..but it was something that I was considering doing
because of something that I wanted.
And he's got me and he's doing this on my shoulders.
He's like rubbing me,
but I'm holding him, and I'm holding him strong.
And he goes, "But you want to." I go, "No, I don't!"
And I grabbed his face,
and I planted the biggest fucking kiss right on his fucking lips.
Not tongue, not making out.
I went... KISSING SOUNDS "Agh!"
And I pushed his head back and I went, "I'm leaving."
And I got into the elevator and I immediately pulled out my phone
and I called my mom.
Think about, like, how many guys did it,
went through and compromised what they really wanted to do,
or who they were fundamentally...
..and did it and got nothing out of it.
That's got to be even more...
Like, talk about just making you go...
..off the Richter scale.
What had happened in that bathroom...
..I felt like was leverage for me.
Like, "Hey, I didn't go to the Enquirer.
"I'm going to keep your secret,
"and you're going to help me make my career."
And he'd only gotten more famous.
CHEERING
He won the Oscar for American Beauty,
and I sent a fax congratulating him
with my cellphone number on it.
And that's when that second chapter occurred.
He invited me to the Soho Grand, where he was staying.
He spent, like, an hour grilling me
about whether I had been followed by...
This white van had been trying to get pictures of him
with younger guys,
and he was very, very paranoid
that I was working for the press.
At a certain point,
he kind of realised that I was telling the truth,
and I wasn't trying to, like, con him.
And that's when he put my hand on his crotch,
and he clearly wanted me to jerk him off.
I was frozen in shock,
so that stopped quickly, and he jerked himself off.
And I got up and washed my hands
and bolted out of that hotel room!
I left New York soon after that,
then moved out to Los Angeles.
I was broke.
I had spent the summer writing a script
I thought would be perfect for him to produce,
and so I reached out to him.
I had come to terms with,
"OK, I'm willing to do something uncomfortable
to get something out of it."
That began the sort of...the booty calls, you know, the late night,
"Hey, what are you doing?"
Which I kept sort of deflecting, deflecting, deflecting.
And finally, I took the call.
Yeah. And straight away he picked me up.
Pulled up his Porsche.
He was very stressed,
I would say, like, anxious.
You know, within minutes, he had whipped out his dick.
And I was like, "Well, I guess I'm going to try to give him head
"and see if that works."
There was zero attraction or interest in me being sexual.
I mean, it felt like that was something that I had to do
to get to where I wanted to go.
I think that lasted about five to ten seconds.
I kind of just gagged.
Instead of him just stopping,
he, you know, masturbated next to me in the car as he was driving.
And then as soon as he climaxed,
he, like, became this whole other person.
He was like this full-on entertainer, storyteller.
He wanted to keep driving around
and, like, talk to me for three hours
with, like, cum-stained pants.
But that whole night, he never once asked me anything about myself.
He never asked me about my script.
Every time I would try to bring it up, he didn't care.
And that's when it really hit me, like, there was no quid pro quo.
He was never offering me anything.
It was almost like I got to be in the graces of his company.
And that's your gift for letting me cum all over myself next to you.
I don't know if it was a few days later or whatever when he called,
and I was like, "You know what, Kevin?
"I'm sorry but, like, I like women. I'm not gay."
And he lost his shit and screaming on the phone like,
"I just needed a friend."
And clearly very upset that I was insinuating that he was gay.
It's one thing to be like, "Don't tell anybody."
It's another thing to be like, "I'm not gay."
You know what I mean?
Um...
And so I guess that made me just feel bad for him.
You know, it's like, "Wow, man, you really, you don't know yourself,
"and you can't be yourself. And that sucks."
I didn't think I'd ever see him again,
but where I was at - The Whisky Bar at the Sunset Marquis -
lo and behold, who shows up?
And there's Kevin.
And he comes over and, you know, we all say hi,
and he said he wanted to talk to me.
So, as we're down at the end of the bar, there's the two gay guys -
not super flamboyant, but you could tell they were gay.
And Kevin notices them and he starts doing these voices for them
as if they're these over-the-top drag queens.
But kind of in a creepy way, like really shitty, making fun of them.
They were just regular guys having a drink.
It was shocking.
I'm like, "What the hell is going on here?"
"What's he doing?"
It was kind of my first indication...
..that maybe he was uncomfortable in his own skin.
Some sort of inner self-hatred.
I think it...it speaks volumes
about how he feels about his own sexuality.
It's...it's a part of him that he doesn't like.
Success is both a fantastic thing
and a little dangerous, I think.
And so I think that one has to always try to keep success
a little bit at bay.
REPORTER: Another thing he's tried to keep at bay are questions
about his sexuality.
But questions about his sexuality would not go away.
So he decided he had to respond,
choosing the overtly heterosexual magazine Playboy
to publicly deny that he is gay.
So, do you have a girlfriend?
I... I...
Uh, I've been in a relationship for a while. Yeah.
With whom?
Um, her name is Diane.
I would never judge Kevin Spacey in terms of choosing
not to be a publicly out gay actor.
Well, being in the closet, for me, I can only really speak for me,
it's a very lonely place.
It's a very scary place.
It can be a very self-loathing place.
It is actively damaging to your ability
to have normal, healthy relationships.
Constantly being aware of your own behaviour and checking it,
and censoring it, and making sure that at no point are you slipping
or revealing who you are or how you're behaving.
It also does not in any way, nor should it, excuse abusive behaviour,
but it can illuminate our understanding for what's driving it.
I don't believe that because you're unhappy
with who you are that you can't come out, that you're ashamed of it,
whatever, that that in any way justifies the kind of aggression
that he was showing.
Clearly, it was homosexual in nature, but so uncalled for.
Unnatural, inhuman.
Uh, no.
That shows somebody who's screaming for help.
For at least some of the people who were coming forward,
they didn't feel like they could make an allegation against
Kevin Spacey, because to do so would be tantamount to outing him.
And that gets to the pernicious nature of the closet.
Even just the first reaction when I told people that he was gay,
you'd be surprised how many people would tell me to my face
that, "No, he isn't gay,"
that, "You have misunderstood or you misinterpreted."
So, I just thought, "You know what? I'm just gonna keep this to myself."
But Dawn, of all people,
could tell that something wasn't necessarily right.
So I was on the show, doing background.
I was part of Claire's Secret Service team.
I did, like, five seasons on the show,
and as each season progressed, things got tenser...
..especially when you see
a hand in a position
that should not be there -
hand on the back, lower back, or a hand on the leg.
Women can tell when there's something off,
something going on that's not right.
But what really concerned me was when Daniel comes running over to us
and he says, "Dawn, you gotta hide me!"
"What's going on?"
"Kevin's after me."
"What?!"
I remember telling him how I love boxing.
You know, I was talking myself up like I'm this tough guy,
I'm this great boxer, this great fighter,
and he's not the least bit scared of me.
I felt that he actually had the power to break me down,
because of his role in the film
and his role as executive producer of House of Cards.
That terrified me.
Where is Daniel? Hey, Daniel.
Daniel! Oh, my God!
SHE LAUGHS
Oh, you...! Ooh, look at him!
Oi!
That night when you came running over to us... Mm-hm.
..it was like
something majorly bad had to happen for you to do that. Mm-hm.
So I called the union and I said, "You need to talk to Spacey
"because he's a sexual harassment suit waiting to happen."
I honestly... I did not think that it would get that bad
or that it even had the potential to get that bad
until, like... I mean, he groped me and...
SHE GASPS Yeah.
Are you serious? Yeah.
Like, stand up. Like, it was... He groped you in the butt?
No, no... He groped you in the front? Yeah.
I didn't know Spacey groped him.
He was young.
He was just new in the business.
It's sad and it should not have happened.
And...
SIGHS ..it pisses me off.
When you are playing a leading role, it is also a leadership role.
I've always believed that you have to come on to a set
and be a part of creating an environment
where people want to do their best work.
And when I've seen examples of people who...
..you know, mistreat others on a set or...um...
..I call them out on it.
Is that one of your philosophies in life? Yeah.
Just be one of the good guys? Yeah.
I'm Chloe Melas. I'm an entertainment journalist.
We were in the throes of the #MeToo movement.
The allegations against Harvey Weinstein had just been published.
And you were hearing about allegations
against other famous actors.
I had just come back from maternity leave
and I had been back at work maybe a week.
I had all these hormones raging and I just sort of channelled it
into this Kevin Spacey investigation.
I started making phone calls to as many people as I could find
who had either worked on House of Cards
or who were working on House of Cards.
I had some people tell me that, you know,
Kevin Spacey had touched them inappropriately,
rubbing their shoulders, a pat on the butt,
a lingering hug.
He would shake their hand, and then on point of contact,
he would then grab their hand down to his crotch -
what people described as a toxic work environment that made them
not want to work around Kevin Spacey or fearful to be around him,
worried that they might get preyed upon next.
I spoke to one young man who told me that while he's in the car
with Kevin Spacey, Kevin put his hand down his pants.
This is his dream job that's now turned into a total nightmare.
In the end, after speaking to about 200 people,
I got eight to agree to tell me their stories -
stories that would cause the House of Cards show to collapse.
Next thing you know, there are these allegations
coming from across the pond, overseas, in the UK.
ARCHIVE: Hollywood star Kevin Spacey taking up his new role
at one of London's most famous theatres.
He pulled me in very close with his right hand,
and he put his left hand down by my bum.
It's the best job I've ever had, cos I get to bring people together
and be a part of creating a family.
I just felt so small.
I started to get, like, scared of coming to work.
"Is it going to happen again today?"
ARCHIVE: Kevin Spacey receives an honorary knighthood
for services to British theatre.
If this is not criminal behaviour, it is nonetheless bad behaviour,
and that's why it needs to be called out and it needs to be discussed.
The message to Kevin has to be, "It's over."
You know, "It's over for you."
Subtitles by Red Bee Media