LONDON (AP) — Two-time Oscar winner Kevin Spacey is happening trial Wednesday in a London court docket on expenses of sexually assaulting 4 males so long as 20 years in the past.
Spacey, 63, has pleaded not responsible to a dozen expenses together with sexual assault, indecent assault and inflicting an individual to interact in intercourse exercise with out consent. He may face a jail sentence if convicted.
Spacey has stated an acquittal within the case may revive a profession that has largely been on ice since sexual misconduct allegations surfaced towards the star who received his first Academy Award for supporting actor in “The Traditional Suspects” in 1995.
“There are folks proper now who’re prepared to rent me the second I’m cleared of those expenses in London,” Spacey stated in a uncommon interview printed this month in Germany’s Zeit journal. He stated the media had turned him right into a “monster.”
The costs involving males now of their 30s or 40s date from 2001 to 2013 — masking a lot of the decade when he lived in Britain and served as creative director of the Previous Vic Theatre till 2015.
The jury trial in Southwark Crown Courtroom is scheduled to final 4 weeks.
The actor — charged beneath his full identify, Kevin Spacey Fowler — is free on bail.
Spacey’s downfall got here amid the #MeToo motion in the USA when allegations led to him being written off the Netflix political thriller “Home of Playing cards,” the place he performed lead character Frank Underwood, a ruthless and corrupt congressman who turns into president. He was lower from the finished movie “All of the Cash within the World,” and the scenes reshot with Christopher Plummer.
Spacey grew to become one of the crucial celebrated actors of his technology in Nineteen Nineties, starring in movies together with “Glengarry Glen Ross” and “LA Confidential.” He received his second Oscar, for finest actor, within the 1999 film “American Magnificence.”
Spacey lately had his first movie roles in a number of years, showing in 2022 in Italian director Franco Nero’s “The Man Who Drew God,” and enjoying the late Croatian President Franjo Tudjman in biopic “As soon as Upon a Time in Croatia.” He additionally stars within the unreleased U.S. movie “Peter 5 Eight.”
Italy’s Nationwide Cinema Museum in Turin gave him its lifetime achievement award in January. He additionally taught a masterclass and launched a sold-out screening of “American Magnificence” in what had been billed as Spacey’s first talking engagements in 5 years.
Spacey saluted organizers for “making a robust protection of creative achievement” and for having “le palle” — the Italian phrase for male physique components synonymous with braveness — to ask him.
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Related Press author Jill Lawless contributed to this report.