“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.”
Spacey was a guest on Maher’s “Club Random” podcast on Monday. It was his answer to Maher’s remark that in his case there was “too much smoke to be no fire.” Then he added: “I hit on a lot of guys.”
He leaned hard on his court record. “We’ve won in every court we’ve gone into with a jury,” he said. The case he named was Anthony Rapp’s, who accused him of making an unwanted sexual advance when Rapp was 14. “We won in federal court in New York,” Spacey said. In his telling, some allegations are partly true but have been “rethought” or “redesigned,” and others “entirely made up.”
Maher said Spacey “should have gotten some punishment” but had also paid a heavy price.
The price began in 2017, when the allegations surfaced. Spacey said then that he did not remember the incident and offered an apology. Netflix fired him from “House of Cards.” Ridley Scott’s “All the Money in the World” was already shot, and Christopher Plummer took over the part, with Spacey’s scenes reshot. Yahoo’s report on the podcast says he has faced dozens of misconduct and harassment allegations over the years.
Spacey says the mood has changed. “I feel much more welcomed,” he said, adding that “things are moving in the direction that we hoped they were moving in.” And: “I feel less in jail than I did.”
He gave a reason. “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. If you’re hitting home runs, they want you on the field.”
Sources
- ‘Won in every court’: Kevin Spacey claims Hollywood warming up again after sexual assault allegations and exile
- Kevin Spacey Compares His Misconduct to a ‘Small Kitchen Fire’
