UK prosecutors charge actor Kevin Spacey with sexual assault

The United Kingdom’s Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) says actor Kevin Spacey has been charged with several criminal offences including sexual assault against three men following an investigation by police in London.

Police said on Thursday that the alleged offences had taken place between March 2005 and April 2013, with four incidents taking place in the capital and one in Gloucestershire, western England.

They involved one man who is now in his 40s and two men now in their 30s.

“The CPS has authorised 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.”

Spacey was questioned by UK police in 2019 about claims by several men that he had assaulted them.

Slew of allegations

Once one of Hollywood’s biggest stars, Spacey was dropped from the United States TV show House of Cards and removed from the movie All the Money in the World in 2017 after accusations concerning his alleged sexual misconduct came to light.

In November 2017, London’s Old Vic theatre said it had received 20 separate allegations of inappropriate conduct by Spacey from 20 men who came into contact with him at the theatre, or in connection with it, between 1995 and 2013. The 62-year-old served as the theatre’s artistic director between 2004 and 2015.

Spacey, who won Oscars for best actor in  American Beauty and best supporting actor in The Usual Suspects, has previously denied all accusations levelled against him.

Roberto Cavazos, an actor who worked at the Old Vic, said in 2017 that he had encounters with the Hollywood star at the time “that verged on what you could call harassment”. It is not known if Cavazos is one of the men Spacey has been charged with assaulting.

The same year, actor Anthony Rapp accused Spacey of assaulting him at a party in the 1980s, when Rapp was a teenager.

Spacey denies the allegations and is currently trying to have a lawsuit from Rapp in New York thrown out. A judge in Manhattan last year dismissed claims by a second man who was suing Spacey, after the plaintiff refused to identify himself publicly.

That came after prosecutors in Massachusetts in the US in 2019 dismissed a criminal case brought against him – an indecent assault and battery charge stemming from the alleged groping of an 18-year-old man at a Nantucket resort.