“I never said there was no fire,” Kevin Spacey told Bill Maher. “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.”
Spacey, 66, made the remark on Monday, June 29, during an appearance on Maher’s Club Random podcast. Maher, 70, had just said he goes by the numbers with scandals and thought “there’s too much smoke to be no fire.” More than 50 men have come forward with accusations against the former House of Cards star since 2017.
Spacey has denied all of them. He was acquitted or found not liable in the cases that reached a jury, and he told Maher that years of exile from Hollywood may be ending. He said he feels “much more welcomed” in the industry.
The Rapp case
One accusation drew a sharper response. In 2017, Anthony Rapp, now 54, told Buzzfeed News that Spacey molested him in the 1980s. Rapp was 14 at the time and Spacey was 26. Spacey denied it, and a jury found him not liable in 2022.
“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,” Spacey said. “Certainly in the case of Anthony Rapp, which is a case that we won in federal court in New York.”
