This programme contains strong language and discussions
of a sexual nature that some viewers may find distressing
So here's the school off to our right.
If you look through there, you can see the auditorium.
We would rehearse in one of these permanent buildings.
So I went to Chatsworth High School with Kevin.
I got involved with the drama club.
The actor with an outsized reputation
was Kevin Fowler.
Everybody seemed to like him,
as well as recognise how good of an actor he was.
He was already planning to be successful
at that age, in high school.
He was going to adopt his middle name as his last name,
his middle name, Spacey.
His personality was often inspiring.
Jumping and yelling and stamping
and also just goofing off with us.
I was a kid who didn't focus very well.
I wasn't really all that academic.
I didn't really care that much about classes.
I was a bit disruptive, I was the class clown.
I would have been 16,17 at the time
and, uh...Kevin was a year ahead.
My interest was in girls,
and anything theatre-related was just really exciting for me.
Taking pictures was my way of capturing the moment.
The people.
Kevin here pretending he's going to choke me to death
for continuing to take pictures.
"Ah, Greg, you're so weird.
"I've really watched you grow as a person and a performer.
"My, you have 'come out'!
"I wish you all the luck in the world.
"You're a pretty strange guy but cool.
"Stay good!
"Always, Kevin Fowler."
I don't recall if he wrote this in my yearbook, um...
..before the incident in the car or after.
We were having a drama party at one of the student's houses,
and Kevin asked for a ride.
So I had a car.
Pick him up, and we headed over to the party.
And on the way to the party...
..he made a physical advance in the car,
which was extremely uncomfortable.
I'm driving.
And he's in the passenger seat,
reaching over...to get a feel.
He grabbed my genitals.
Definitely with... with intention and with purpose.
Just...shock and surprise and...
I was, in a sense, trapped.
It was a very aggressive sexual move
for that age group.
There was no consent,
as we ask for today or as we...expect today.
I had no idea that he was
interested in me sexually or...
..anything other than just as another theatre kid,
like he was.
Later on in the evening at the party,
he then cornered me, pleading to not...
..mention what had happened in the car to anyone.
At that age in Chatsworth,
it was not accepted to be outwardly...gay.
It was not a common thing or an accepted thing.
He was planning to move away, to pursue acting,
so I didn't think I would ever see him again
after that school year anyway,
so there was no need to drag his name through any scandal.
I told him I wouldn't,
just to not, you know, do anything else.
And he didn't.
BBC NEWS: The Hollywood star Kevin Spacey
is found not guilty of sexually assaulting four men.
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.
REPORTER: The star leaves court an innocent man.
he will hope he can resume a career that reached the highest levels.
He just had these real dead eyes looking at me,
and I just felt like I was staring into, like, a soulless monster.
It was cold in a way that almost was inhuman.
Your first reaction is not violence.
You feel like you brought it on to yourself and you feel shame.
It was all about, "I can do this.
"I can do this to you, I'm Kevin Spacey."
Now, we've become accustomed to Hollywood stars
coming over here to tread the boards.
Well, the Oscar-winning actor Kevin Spacey
has taken his love affair with the British theatre one stage further.
To find myself in the role of director of the Old Vic
is beyond my wildest imaginings.
The Old Vic was on its last legs,
but then when Kevin came on board, it became the place to be.
He was the...cash cow, if you like.
The true test is whether he can get the punters through the doors
and earn this place the money it so desperately needs.
Holes in the roof mean the audience has to dodge the rain.
Who's going to buy, you know, a £25,000 ticket at a gala
to come and sit at the Old Vic,
unless...there is the opportunity
to be near the lustre of this Hollywood star?
I sort of got to the end of, you know, '99,
American Beauty had come out,
and I was like, "Well, that kind of went better than I could have hoped.
"Now what am I supposed to do?"
And I just thought, "No, I think I want another dream."
When I first arrived at the Old Vic,
I was very excited to see him onstage
and learn from someone who was, you know, very talented.
He just had stage presence like no other person.
He knew how to manipulate his audience,
to, you know, kind of almost have them under his spell.
It was a dream, you know -
it was a dream for the Old Vic, a dream for everybody.
Listen, I wasn't doing anything glamorous.
I was selling ice creams, I was helping people get to their seats.
And during this time,
there was a pantomime going on called Cinderella.
It was a very family atmosphere,
but it was a really, really great show.
I was working in the stalls,
on the right-hand side.
It was my job to guard the door to check who was coming in.
And so he'd come back into the stalls and just watch
and then all of a sudden...
..he, like...
..had somehow wedged his whole body
inside this tiny little gap, like right here.
I didn't even know you could fit a person in this little gap,
because it really was just a kind of a cove where the usher would sit.
And I remember just, like, moving, like, slightly over,
thinking, "Oh, maybe he doesn't realise how much gap there is."
You just see the brightness of the stage,
and everything is very, very dark.
But then...
And because of where I was sitting, and he was standing...
HE SIGHS
..I felt like his whole groin push on my face.
There's someone that I had tremendous respect for,
and he was pushing his groin on my face
during whilst I was working.
Whilst the pantomime was going on with families and children.
And I could...smell him.
I could feel him getting pleasure by it.
I froze just in a way that I... I couldn't move.
And I just...
..felt so small.
I started to get, like, scared of coming to work.
"Is it going to happen again today?"
He had this, like, look of intent now with me
since that incident that still kind of haunts me,
like...like he owned part of me.
There was continual moments where...
..he would, like, touch me, like, from behind
or brush himself across me in a way that was completely uninvited.
I remember, like, a pressing,
a form of, like, something, like, going inside of my trousers
and just being like jolted, like perked.
And I remember it getting closer and closer and more intimate
and like...
Oh, God, I mean...
I just thought, "What have I done to deserve this, you know?
"How can you get on that stage?
"How can you sleep at night?"
Oh, it's just...
It's such an invasion of...
..a human being.
I just felt like a piece of meat.
There was no relationship.
It was all about, "I can do this.
"I can do this to you, I'm Kevin Spacey."
Please say hello to Kevin Spacey!
CHEERING AND APPLAUSE
How long have you been in London now?
I moved there in 2003.
Not only have they welcomed you over there,
but the royal family, they gave you a necklace?
Yeah. CHEERING AND APPLAUSE
Yeah. It's a...
What medal is this? This is a...
It's a little royal bling.
Yeah!
And what it's called, is it's called a CBE...
CBE. ..which is an honorary knighthood.
It's actually... It's rather nice.
To see on Jimmy Kimmel
that he had received an award from the royal family
for his services to British theatre, it really hurt.
I think we can't underestimate the power he has and had,
and I think that was a moment when I knew I couldn't speak up.
Good morning, everyone. How is everyone? How are you?
Let's just keep moving around,
and we might do an exercise that I rather like...
MELVYN BRAGG: Central to his artistic mission at the Old Vic
is his commitment to developing new audiences and emerging talent
through the Old Vic's New Voices programme.
It was about sending the elevator back down,
and I always loved that saying,
that's why it's still burned into my memory.
If you've done well in the business you wanted to do well in,
if you've been successful,
then it's your obligation to spend a good portion of your time
sending the elevator back down.
He would say it in interviews and all sorts of promotion material.
That was the philosophy that the great Jack Lemmon passed down to me.
I'll never forget when I was just 13,
I got the chance to do a workshop with Mr Lemmon,
and after I did a scene, he walked up to me,
he put his hand on my shoulder,
and he said, "That was a touch of terrific."
And it was really the beginning of discovering my own potential.
We were aiming at young people aged 18 to 26.
Welcome to the fourth year
of the Old Vic New Voices 24 Hour Plays Gala.
He was always, you know, giving good advice,
and they were always so starry-eyed and wide-eyed.
They were like puppy dogs, you know,
drinking from the fountain of, you know, knowledge.
We're all big fans of Kevin, cos we all,
most of us go to Julliard, where Kevin went long ago.
It's really great, cos we're front row right now
and we can touch him if we wanted to.
Anybody, anybody, anybody, anybody, don't be shy.
It's always interesting when I'm in a workshop,
and I'm always looking for the shy kid in the corner,
because that was me when I grew up
and I started doing these kinds of workshops. Yeah.
We're invited to go and do a workshop
with Kevin at the Old Vic.
It's amazing.
We're standing on the stage,
and we're with Kevin Spacey,
and there's this feeling
of anything's possible in those moments,
because you're rubbing shoulders with such success.
We sat down on the floor in a circle all together first.
"Say your name and something about yourself" sort of thing.
And I was leant back like this,
and the first thing I can recall happening
is that Kevin put his hand on my hand.
Then we all got up
and started taking it in turns to do the scene work.
And the thing I remember about that particular moment
is seeing him look like he was interested in the scenes,
but actually he was sort of just working his way around the room,
putting his arm around
what seems to be the most handsome guys in the space.
One of them he hugged quite aggressively.
And then a little bit more time goes on,
and it's my turn to do my scene.
And then Kevin came right into my personal space,
and I remember being held by... by him, both my arms were held,
and he whispered, in my ear, something along the lines of...
"You don't give a fuck about what she has to say.
"You just want to fuck her in the ass."
I just felt his body up against my body.
I think his penis was against my leg.
I mean, it's...it's horrible.
The cynical part of my brain says that
we were all invited under false pretences
to do a scene study on...
..the play they were doing,
but actually he was just there deciding who he'd like to...
..to flirt with next.
This is more than a job,
because I'm finally doing something that is outside of my own career
and bigger than myself,
and I'm able to see the effects it has on people's lives
every single day.
So I was in my fourth year at school
where he came in to do a workshop
on Shakespeare monologues.
It was huge, I was thrilled,
and I wanted him to think that I was good.
He came over to me, encouraging me and saying,
he said, "Well, if you ever want to
"work on any of your audition material,
"we could do that."
It struck me as such an extraordinary offer.
He was trying to find a way for us to meet up.
And I said, "Oh, I'm going to see
"the third year performing their Shakespeare,
"so I can't."
And he said, "Well, we can go together."
So, you know, we're in this dark theatre together.
He would just very casually but frequently
lean over to me next to him
and sort of whisper in my ear, very close,
frequent enough and close enough
and lingering enough that... it was pretty clear.
And then if that wasn't clear,
him putting his hand on my thigh and my intimate...
the inner part of my thigh... was crystal clear.
I felt this was about pursuit and sex.
It brought up all kinds of those emotions of guilt and shame,
and somehow I let this happen,
and that those feelings sort of supplant
or kind of grow overtop of thinking he should be ashamed.
It was about a six-month period
where I would say, every couple of weeks or so,
I would get voicemails.
He was running the Old Vic at the time,
so he wasn't always around.
"Hey, I'm in town and I've got this party.
"Hey, I'm in town, and I'm going to this premiere.
"Hey, I'm in town and I'm staying at this hotel with tennis courts,
"and we could play and have a steam in the steam bath afterwards."
I don't want this.
I'm not interested in this, I'm creeped out by this.
But he's still this person
who has power and influence
and who was literally my teacher last week.
It's really hard
to feel as though you can say no to that person,
if he's willing and interested
in exploiting that kind of power position
for, you know, his own desires.
I just don't think that's...right.
And this is Kevin, my brother,
and we were both just standing there looking off into the distance.
We just seemed to have bonded so closely.
For so many years, we were close.
But as soon as you introduced our parents into the formula,
the dynamics just became... stifling, squished.
I think what happened to us, how we drifted apart,
it makes me sad.
In 1969...
..it was the summer, that's when it first started.
My father took me up to the master bedroom...
..and raped me.
He sodomised me, he gave me oral sex.
I was screaming for my mother.
And my mother came upstairs,
and the bedroom door was locked.
She goes, "What's going on in there?"
My mother's banging on the door, and my father...
..put his arm up against my neck and threw me against the wall
and says, "Don't say a word."
And then all of a sudden, there was silence,
and she just walked away.
I was only 13, 14 years old.
This kind of nonsense went on for years,
and it wasn't until 1971 I just said,
"No.
"This has to stop now."
And I threatened him.
And I said, "If you ever lay a hand on Kevin,
"I'm going to tell mother."
And that was the last sexual abuse.
When I moved out in 1975,
I kind of felt guilty,
but I couldn't take it any longer.
"What about Kevin?
"What's going to happen to my little brother?"
But then I started thinking about it,
realising that how close my mother was to Kevin,
that I thought that she would protect him.
I just had to take a chance that he would be OK.
But just because he wasn't being abused
doesn't mean that there wasn't psychological trauma
going on within him from the strange family life we had.
It is only in the theatre experience that you can create families
and really lasting relationships.
So having moved to London,
the Old Vic, 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 wanted to be the best in the world.
I got an agent,
and then I had an audition for World War Z
with Brad Pitt.
Stay close.
I'm the guy with the gun!
Nice little close-up.
I got a call from my agent,
and it was an offer for Sweet Bird Of Youth at the Old Vic in London.
There's not many gigs in Theatreland
that are better than a summer show at the Old Vic,
so I just put everything into it.
And being the youngest in a cast like that,
the pressure that I put on myself.
"Don't fuck this up.
"Do a really good job and you might get to do this again
"in a Kevin Spacey show at the Old Vic."
Everything is building up to that press night,
as close as you can get to a Hollywood premiere.
So I go over to my dressing room,
and there's a knock at the door.
Kevin's assistant comes in and says,
"Ruari, this is from Kevin."
And I opened the box, and it had a little card from Kevin,
and it said, "Ruari - Happy Opening! K."
And a gift.
I don't know how much it costs,
but it's an original poster of Sweet Bird Of Youth.
And there was a real silence in the room.
I felt a little bit embarrassed, if I'm being honest.
APPLAUSE BUILDS
So show finishes,
and there's immediately the press night after-party.
We made our way down to the Savoy.
When you walk in, on your left,
you have the nation's photographers from every newspaper,
getting photographs of people,
and there's people standing there from the cast,
famous people who had been invited to the press night.
And I see Kevin.
And so I did what I felt like I had to do.
I walked up to him, and I put my hand out,
and I said, "Thank you so much for the gift, Kevin."
And...he pulled me in very close with his right hand...
..and sort of turned me 45 degrees.
Now, I don't know that that was to hide from the cameras,
but I can only assume that was what he was trying to do.
And he put his left hand down by my...
..my-my bum.
And he stuck his middle finger
as far up...me as possible.
Erm...
I was wearing a suit, so...
..he took up the recessed material
and just tried to go up through my boxers, up inside me.
I just totally froze.
He pulled me in closer in his ear, in my ear, he whispered,
"Don't worry about it."
He did that, and then he, just like a shark,
just moved straight through
and moved into Kevin mode at a press night,
so went and took pictures.
And it's horrible to know that, like, you're doing that one second,
and the next minute you're carrying on like nothing's happened.
It feels like you're invisible.
I can see all the photographers,
and there's, like, all these eyes and all these faces,
and you're moving through them,
and you just want, er... someone to help you.
I stopped... putting in work for auditions.
Staying in bed all day.
You just go like that.
What's the point?
There was a naivety there of feeling like you were on a mission
to become the best actor in the world,
but as soon as you get made to feel, like, that small,
you're almost muted, you know, your voice gets smaller.
I didn't feel like I was in an environment,
if I did tell someone,
they would have believed me or even supported me.
This was a London theatre with an A-list star...
..and they worshipped him.
From that point on, I don't see my career as anything else
other than just sort of darting around the edges of...
..quite substantial addiction issues and relationship issues.
Now to Washington's obsession with a show
that happens to make Washington look like a den of vipers.
Yeah, it's called House Of cards, and it's available on Netflix,
and it stars Kevin Spacey.
Netflix was the DVD delivery company
that, like, my parents signed up for.
They had transitioned into streaming,
and then Netflix is now going to be making their own TV shows,
and House Of Cards was one of the first.
Netflix has made a loud and pricey statement that they've arrived,
betting $100 million on a project with Kevin Spacey.
What about my guest tonight? Academy Award-winning actor,
his Netflix series, now showing its second season,
is called House Of Cards.
Please welcome back to the programme Kevin Spacey!
Kevin Spacey was on every chat show.
He was on The Daily Show, Jon Stewart loved him.
You Machiavellian piece of BLEEP, you conniving...
It's so good!
So my role in relation to Kevin is, I was the first team PA on set,
which meant that I had eyes on Kevin pretty much all of the time.
I had never been so close
to a performer that commanded the room in such a way,
and I was just so blown away by it.
It was literally the last scene of season two.
Frank has finally
become the president through all of the scheming,
and he's taking his first moment inside the Oval Office.
You just see him settling into
this, like, power he has worked so hard for,
and at the very end of it,
he just looks dead in the camera
and smacks his fist on the table.
You felt the oxygen, all the oxygen in that room,
focus on him.
And cut! Nice!
It was like, "Oh, this is how you win Oscars."
I'm having the time of my life working on it.
Literally every day is just a joy to work on.
Well, I wish things were that ruthlessly efficient.
LAUGHTER
It's true, I was looking at Kevin Spacey,
I was thinking, "This guy's getting a lot of stuff done."
I loved working on House Of Cards, I adored working on that set.
But, um, the behaviour that was going on
also made it a hostile work environment
for a lot of people.
I thought he was, like, incredible. You know?
He just had this this aura about him on screen,
but then we're on the other side of the set,
and right there in that moment, at a workplace,
I was inappropriately touched.
It was kind of shocking.
It was like seeing someone just kind of shift in front of you,
and I just remember he just had these very cold eyes,
like empty, soulless.
I caught him in this moment where there was the real Kevin.
The issue of Kevin was certainly well known.
It was like, "Oh, yeah, that's the thing."
"That's what happens here."
The issues surrounding Kevin were typically with men.
Both myself and the base-camp production assistant,
we were both women.
It's all very coded, but it was implied to me
that it was to account for the fact
that there was, quote-unquote, you know, bad behaviour,
and they wanted to make sure
that they weren't putting someone in too close proximity
where it could happen again.
I would often see him walk up to performers,
walk up to, like, background actors we had on set,
and he would, you know, kind of get very close
and clearly be like engaging with them in this way.
I would see him, you know, put a hand on like an arm
and, like, talk about their muscles.
You know, there would be kind of that kind of grabby flirtatiousness
would happen if he felt like he could get away with it.
There were crew members that were made to feel very uncomfortable.
So one of the feelings that you get
when you're a woman in this environment
where you're used to being the one who's the target is,
"Wow, at least it's not me."
But then you're seeing it happen to other people,
and that's not that's not something you want to be happening either.
We had a crew member who Kevin was particularly fixed on,
and he was he was spending so much time going up to this person,
trying to engage with this person, trying to engage with this person,
that that person's boss actually moved them off of set.
Because he's the executive producer, he's your boss,
and so if he comes up to you and wants to engage in conversation,
you're in some way obligated to.
It puts you in a really weird headspace
where you're kind of waiting to be, like,
"What's bad enough where something has to be done about this?
"Is there some way I can insert myself to kind of save them?"
It was not clear what you could do.
You could call...Netflix?
It just seemed like he was unstoppable.
Kevin was getting a lot of praise for his role in House Of Cards.
He won the Golden Globes Award, he won the SAG Award.
My favourite, Kevin Spacey!
Yes!
Thank you. Thank you.
I just want to talk a little bit
about the theory of relativity, um...
LAUGHTER
Yeah, because apparently they say that if you're in an elevator,
you don't know whether you're going up or going down,
but right now, it feels like I'm going up.
Thank you very much. APPLAUSE FADES
I was invited to go to the Bafta Britannia Awards.
And, um...
Would you please welcome two-time Academy Award winner Kevin Spacey?!
All of a sudden, Kevin Spacey comes onstage.
This is...ten years later.
And I had not seen him since these incidences,
and my heart just sank to the floor.
You wrecked part of my life.
And there was this whole room adoring you.
And I thought, "Ten years have gone past,
"what more has he done?"
And that whole weekend was a blur because...
the Friday was the event.
The Saturday...
..I told my mum.
And the Sunday, the news broke.
Tonight, there is a scandal swirling around actor Kevin Spacey,
the Hollywood star accused of sexual misconduct.
Spacey allegedly forced himself
on a future Broadway star, Anthony Rapp.
Well, we have the reporter who broke this story,
Adam B Vary of BuzzFeed News.
Anthony Rapp was very much moved by the number of women
who were coming forward in the wake of the Harvey Weinstein scandal,
and he felt like, as he said,
he was really awake to the moment we're living in now. Yeah.
I think Kevin Spacey stands out
in the first few months of the MeToo movement,
because he was the first prominent man
to have an allegation brought against him by another man.
Within a couple hours of the BuzzFeed story publishing,
Kevin Spacey released a statement.
In a statement, Spacey says, quote,
"If I've behaved then as he describes,
"I owe him the sincerest apology
"for what would have been deeply inappropriate drunken behaviour."
Spacey tweeted he does not remember the alleged encounter,
which Rapp detailed in an interview with BuzzFeed.
Still, Spacey says he's beyond horrified by the story,
and he says it has encouraged him
to do something he's never done before -
publicly acknowledge that he is gay.
There was a great deal of pushback from the LGBTQ community
for that statement.
It's a real shame that, after many, many opportunities
that Kevin Spacey did have to come out in a positive way,
that he's ended up coming out in what has been a very negative way.
As a queer person myself,
Kevin's decision to come out
on the back end of these accusations
that were brought against him by other men
was frustrating,
because it felt like it was being used as a distraction.
I don't know what Kevin Spacey's intentions were with that statement,
but that was how it was received by a lot of people.
That's warped, that's wrong.
No-one knows what journey you can or can't take in coming out,
and it's different for everybody,
which is all the more reason to continue to pursue it
until you find a way to live with yourself
and not hate yourself for being who you are.
That's what the coming-out process is,
and that's why I really worry about Spacey's health.
Because where is his head in with this?
Since he came out to defend himself against accusations,
he's not said a word about the gay community,
about being a gay man,
about how it feels to be an out gay man.
That's not in this conversation and that to me is very suspect.
I thought Kevin Spacey's statement seemed strange.
He's half apologising
for this allegation that Anthony Rapp is making,
but he's now also using this as a moment to come out as gay.
And to me, that was just a red flag
that he was trying to deflect from something bigger.
I shut myself in this small little conference room,
and I called hundreds of people over the next two or three days.
I was talking to all sorts of people who had either
worked on House Of Cards or who were actively working on the show.
I eventually landed with eight people
who were willing to share their stories with me,
but under the condition of anonymity.
A lot of the people that I was speaking to
were just starting out their careers in Hollywood,
and they just weren't emboldened and empowered enough
to feel like they could take on someone as powerful as Kevin Spacey.
And so we published the piece,
and I had no idea what was about to happen.
Netflix has fired actor Kevin Spacey from House of Cards.
Netflix has confirmed House of Cards will resume production next year,
but without the show's main star, Kevin Spacey.
That week, there was a stream of other stories and allegations.
We've got some disturbing new accusations being levelled
this morning against Oscar-winner Kevin Spacey.
It's one of a number of explosive allegations levelled
against the actor in recent weeks.
The effects of
the allegations against Kevin Spacey firebombed his career.
His agency and his publicist dropped him.
Several of Kevin Spacey's projects that had already been shot
were either dropped or dumped.
But is Hollywood being too quick to judge, turning its back
on the Oscar winner before formal charges have even been made?
Next thing you know, there are these allegations coming
from across the pond, overseas in the UK.
20 people have claimed they were victims of inappropriate behaviour
by the actor Kevin Spacey, following an investigation
by the Old Vic Theatre in London.
The Old Vic apologises wholeheartedly to the people
who have told us they've been affected.
Everyone needs to feel that they can speak out no matter who they are.
Thank you.
The reason I've never really spoke out about it was out of, uh, fear.
Yeah, fear of not being believed.
This stuff doesn't happen to guys.
At least, that's what I thought.
Until I experienced what I did on House of Cards.
When you're gay, it's like,
"Oh, well, isn't it just like being at a gay club?"
I even remember someone said, "Oh, lucky you."
Lucky me?
W-... Wha-...?
Would you say that to a woman?
These stories just kept coming.
But Kevin Spacey kept retreating and becoming more reclusive.
And then all of a sudden, he put this bizarre YouTube video
up of himself standing in what appears to be his kitchen,
wearing an apron, and he is channelling his House of Cards
character, Frank Underwood.
I know what you want.
Oh, sure, they may have tried to separate us,
but what we have is too strong.
It's too powerful.
When I saw it, I felt physically ill.
He knows best that we want him back.
And that's so pompously egotistical that it
just makes me angry.
Of course, some believed everything and have just been waiting with
bated breath to hear me confess it all.
But you wouldn't believe the worst without evidence, would you?
Did you?
I remember feeling so judged by watching this.
Oh, of course, they're going to say I'm being disrespectful, not playing
by the rules, like I ever played by anyone's rules before.
I never did.
And you loved it.
He's merging art and life in a really, really distasteful way.
What is he trying to prove here?
He's proving that he can't speak as himself.
He can only speak as the person, the puppeteer behind the character
that he's playing.
We now know that there was all of this turmoil
going on behind the scenes.
Years later, in legal documents, we find out that Media Rights
Capital, the production company behind House of Cards,
was going after Kevin Spacey.
They were headed into season six and they've lost their main star.
Essentially, MRC is saying, "Look, we had to rewrite the show,
"we had to shorten our season and it cost us, you know, millions
"of dollars because of your inappropriate behaviour on the set."
This arbitration court does their own independent investigation,
and they depose several individuals who claim that Kevin Spacey touched
them in a sexually inappropriate manner that was not consensual.
The arbitrator finds, through their interviews,
that this is a pattern of inappropriate behaviour that spans
the first five seasons of the show.
And they say that they find
these individuals that they deposed to be credible,
and that the allegations against Spacey are true.
The arbitration case did not find that Kevin Spacey had done anything
criminal, but what they did find was that Kevin was in breach
of this harassment policy.
Therefore, he was responsible financially
to the production company.
Two years later, this case finds itself in front of a judge
in the Superior Court of California because Kevin Spacey and his legal
team, they appeal the arbitrator's decision, and this judge agrees
with what the arbitrator's found and agrees that Kevin Spacey owes
Media Rights Capital
over $30 million.
This judgement is incredibly significant because to have it
written right there in black and white, this is the first time
that Kevin Spacey has been held accountable for his actions.
Mr Spacey, how do you feel?
Mr Spacey! How are you feeling right now?
There was no battery, there was no party, and nothing happened.
And the jury believed that, by preponderance of the evidence,
more likely than not, that it did not happen.
He called the case weak, said the men were after money, or lying,
or in one case, he'd just mistakenly made a pass in a moment
of real-life drama.
The jury agreed with him.
Hearing the verdict, it was truly devastating.
But it doesn't mean that we all have to be silent.
I can't give up on myself and my truth, and others
shouldn't have to either.
It is not easy to reconcile the not-guilty verdicts of the trials
with my own personal experiences from high school with Kevin.
I'll still know that what happened to me happened to me.
Even though it absolves him of having committed a crime
in those cases,
I know that his behaviour is not morally or ethically acceptable.
You know, he grabbed me and I tried to act like it was nothing.
And it was something, like, it's something I shouldn't
have went through.
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.
When you're in a position like that, right,
power, celebrity, money, like, you have to be even better
than the average person because you're capable of so much
more damage and so much more destruction
than the average person.
He wasn't responsible with that power.
He used it like a weapon.
When I heard the verdict, it was like getting punched
in the face.
But that sense of disappointment and anger and upset crystallised
for me the need to come forward and tell my story.
The baton was almost passed to me to say, you take it up now, you push
this story forward.
The message to Kevin has to be - it's over.
You know, it's over for you.
Because enough of us know and enough of us agree that this is wrong
and it can't keep happening.
I have to respect the judicial system, but I know his behaviour
needs to change.
It did not come from his gaining power.
It's who he is.
My greatest fear post verdicts is that this will empower him to do
it again, to feel emboldened in a sense.
And, that can't be.
Subtitles by Red Bee Media