LONDON: American actor Kevin Spacey was found not guilty on Wednesday of nine sex offences against four men alleged to have occurred between 2004 and 2013.
The star of American Beauty and the TV drama series House of Cards, who turned 64 on Wednesday, was acquitted by majority verdicts in London following a trial that lasted several weeks.
“I imagine that many of you can understand that there’s a lot for me to process after what has just happened today,” he told reporters outside court.
“I’m enormously grateful to the jury for having taken the time to examine all of the evidence and all of the facts carefully before they reached their decision and I am humbled by the outcome today."
The verdict comes less than a year after a New York court dismissed a $40-million sexual misconduct lawsuit brought against him, and follows charges of indecent and sexual assault being dropped in Massachusetts in 2019.
Spacey’s once-stellar career has been halted by the various allegations of sexual offences, which he has always consistently denied and has never been convicted of.
The jury at Southwark Crown Court in south London on Wednesday reached majority decisions on the nine counts, which included sexual assault, after more than 12 hours of deliberations.
In addition to sexual assault, the Oscar-winner had been charged with causing a person to engage in sexual activity without consent, and causing a person to engage in penetrative sexual activity.
After the verdict was read, Spacey began to cry and mouthed “thank you” to the jury, before wiping away tears with a tissue.
During the four-week trial, jurors were told by prosecutors that the actor had aggressively groped three of the men in incidents between 2004 and 2013 in Britain, when he was working at London’s Old Vic theatre.
The court had heard from all four alleged victims, who cannot be named for legal reasons.
One of them, a former aspiring actor, said he woke up to find Spacey performing a sex act on him, suggesting he had been “drugged” in the Hollywood star’s London apartment.
When he gave evidence, Spacey, who was tried under his full name Kevin Spacey Fowler, said the case against him was weak, and that the incidents, if they had occurred, were consensual. He said he was promiscuous, a “big flirt” who had “casual, indiscriminate sexual encounters”.
The prosecution claimed he was a “sexual bully” who revelled in making others feel uncomfortable, including by aggressively grabbing men’s crotches.
Spacey called the claims “madness” and a “stab in the back”.
While he might have made a clumsy pass at one of the men, he said he had never assaulted anyone and suggested that the accusers had come forward to make money.
Spacey told the court that three of the four complainants had brought civil lawsuits against him, saying one had contacted him seeking a payment of more than £450,000 ($577,400), and accepted tasking private investigators to look into at least three of the men.
His lawyer Patrick Gibbs said it was not a crime to like sex or have casual sex even if you were a famous person and that it was “not a crime to have sex with someone of the same sex, because it’s 2023 not 1823”.
The jurors also heard from singer Elton John and his husband David Furnish, who gave evidence as part of Spacey’s defence.
The verdicts in London follow a ruling in a US court last year dismissing separate sexual allegations in a civil case brought there.
A judge ruled the accusations were not proven after a jury was unconvinced by the evidence presented.
