Kevin Spacey has been charged with four counts of sexual assault in the U.K.
The alleged offenses span an eight-year period between 2005 and 2013 and pertain to three victims, all of whom are male. The actor has also been charged with “causing a person to engage in penetrative sexual activity without consent.”
Britain’s Crown Prosecution Service revealed Thursday that one man alleges to have been sexually assaulted twice by Spacey in London in March 2005. A separate victim claims the House of Cards star sexually assaulted him and then forced him to engage in a sex act against his will in the U.K. capital in August 2008. A third man says Spacey assaulted him in Gloucestershire in southwest England in 2013.
“The CPS has authorized criminal charges against Kevin Spacey, 62, for four counts of sexual assault against three men,” Rosemary Ainslie, head of the CPS Special Crime Division, said in a statement. “He has also been charged with causing a person to engage in penetrative sexual activity without consent. The charges follow a review of the evidence gathered by the Metropolitan Police in its investigation. The Crown Prosecution Service reminds all concerned that criminal proceedings against Mr Spacey are active and that he has the right to a fair trial.”
Spacey spent a decade serving as artistic director of the Old Vic theater in London between 2004 and 2015. The Hollywood actor, who won Academy Awards for his roles in The Usual Suspects and American Beauty, was interviewed under caution by Scotland Yard detectives in the U.S. in 2019. The Metropolitan Police probe passed the case to the CPS last year.
The first allegations of sexual misconduct against Spacey first emerged in 2017 when actor Anthony Rapp said Spacey made advances toward him when he was just 14 years old. In a widely ridiculed response, the actor issued a public statement coming out as gay. Spacey was fired from his role on House of Cards in the wake of the allegations and a movie he’d starred in, All the Money in the World, was reshot with Christopher Plummer parachuted in to replace Spacey.
Despite being blacklisted by Hollywood, Spacey is set to return to the silver screen in an upcoming thriller, Peter Five Eight, in which he plays a “‘charismatic man in a black sedan who shows up in a small mountainside community.”
It’s thought the disgraced actor has been keeping an otherwise low profile living in London and vacationing in Florida and California during the British winter. He has consistently denied all allegations of sexual misconduct against him.