Kevin Spacey has been found not guilty of all counts in the actor’s sexual assault trial in the United Kingdom.
The jury spent two days of deliberation following a four-and-a-half-week trial at Southwark Crown Court in London. They acquitted Spacey of seven counts of sexual assault, one count of causing a person to engage in sexual activity without consent, and one count of causing a person to engage in penetrative sexual activity without consent.
Throughout the case, the actor denied all charges levied against him. Going into the trial, Spacey had been facing three more counts of indecent assault, but the judge struck off those charges toward the end due to a “legal technicality.”
Spacey was first charged with four counts of sexual assault by the United Kingdom’s Crown Prosecution Service in May 2022, citing incidents committed against three men between 2001 and 2013. By the time the trial began last month, the number of total charges had risen to 12. Many of the allegations come from the period of time in which Spacey was the artistic director of the Old Vic theater in London, a position he held from 2004 to 2015.
Testifying, Spacey’s accusers described him as a “vile sexual predator,” and prosecutor Christine Agnew called him a “sexual bully” who “delights in making others feel powerless and uncomfortable.” Spacey, on the other hand, continued to paint himself as a victim, claiming that he was “crushed” to hear of the allegations, and felt that at least one of his accusers had stabbed him “in the back,” as he felt their relationship was “intimate.”
In their closing arguments, Spacey’s defense team suggested that his accusers have been lying “for reasons which, ultimately, will only ever be known to themselves.” They also seemed to suggest that Spacey was being unfairly treated on the basis that he lives an “odd” life. A member of his defense team, Patrick Gibbs KC, described Spacey as “a man who is promiscuous, not publicly out, although everyone in the businesses knows he’s gay, who wants to be just a normal guy, or at least some of the time he does — to drink beer and laugh and smoke weed and sit in the front and spend time with younger people who he’s attracted to.”
