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Kevin Spacey told Bill Maher that he is reemerging from Hollywood jail after his career was derailed by dozens of accusations of sexual misconduct and harassment.
“I feel much more welcomed, and I think that things are
moving in the direction that we hoped they were moving in,” Spacey said on Maher’s “Club Random” podcast.
The Oscar-winning star of “American Beauty” and “The Usual Suspects” noted that he had won “in every court we’ve gone into with a jury.”
“There are certain cases where part of something is true, but it’s been rethought, it’s been redesigned, or it’s been entirely made up, certainly in the case of Anthony Rapp, which is a case that we won in federal court in New York,” Spacey said.
Rapp’s allegations that Spacey assaulted him in his New York apartment while Rapp was a teenager appeared in a 2017 Buzzfeed article and triggered the chain of allegations that led to Spacey’s career implosion. Rapp later filed a $40 million civil lawsuit for sexual assault and battery, but a New York jury found Spacey not liable on all counts.
Maher was relatively sympathetic to Spacey during the interview, noting that he was not deeply immersed in the particulars of the various allegations against the star and couldn’t challenge him on every point of fact, but he did share that he thought some claims had merit.
“I’m not going to lie to you, I go by numbers with scandals,” Maher said. “If it’s like one person, I’m always like, I don’t know if I wasn’t in the room.” He added that in Spacey’s case, “There’s too much smoke to be no fire.”
Spacey admitted that his behavior had crossed a line.
“I never said there was no fire,” Spacey said. “It just wasn’t a raging forest fire. It was a small kitchen fire that could have been put out with an extinguisher.”
“I hit on a lot of guys,” he added.
Maher argued that Spacey “should have gotten some punishment.” However, the comedian added that Spacey had “paid a lot” for his offenses.
“A 10-year sentence is a serious sentence,” Maher said.
“I feel less in jail than I did,” Spacey said. “When people actually start to hear the facts, understand what we won in courts, I think people now look at this and think, maybe nine years has been enough.”
“If I had been a sports figure I would have been benched for seven games,” Spacey added. “If you’re hitting home runs, they want you on the field.”
When the allegations against him broke, Spacey was fired from Netflix’s “House of Cards” and replaced by Christopher Plummer in “All the Money in the World.” In recent years, Spacey, who has said he lost everything including his home, has booked jobs in European films and shows, as well as low-budget indies like “Peter Five Eight” and “The Awakening.”
Spacey also used the interview with Maher to address the persistent rumors about his sexuality that accompanied him throughout his career — the actor only came out as gay in response to Rapp’s allegations in a statement that was widely criticized.
“I was fiercely closeted… I thought I was so clever that nobody knew, but of course kind of everybody knew,” Spacey said.
“I never understood why you kept that a secret,” Maher said. “There’s a point where it was so much cooler to be gay… I don’t get a lot of breaks from the media especially they’re a little too woke and blah blah blah, if I, who they’re pretty rough on, at some point came out as gay, it would be the greatest thing that ever happened.”
