Kevin Spacey achieved a victory on Monday in the civil trial for sexual assault against him in New York, where the judge dismissed a charge for considering it duplicate and the Oscar winner took the stand in his defense to deny the accusations.
Spacey, 63, was on the seventh day of the trial in which Anthony Rapp, 50, accuses him of sexually assaulting him at a party in 1986, when Rapp was 14 years old, and is claiming $40 million for the psychological damages allegedly derived from the incident.
At the beginning of the session, the Oscar winner's lawyers requested the dismissal of the case and Judge Lewis Kaplan agreed to drop a charge, explaining that the alleged intentional emotional harm that Rapp accuses Spacey of is an allegation included in the charge of assault.
Then, Spacey took the stand to deny attempting to seduce and touch Rapp with sexual intent at that 1986 party, as the accuser described, and also another accusation of assault from a witness invited a few days ago by Rapp's lawyers, Andrew Holzman.
The star of "American Beauty," who has always been very private about his personal life and only revealed that he was homosexual in a public apology statement after Rapp accused him publicly in 2017, said today he regrets those words, as reported by CNN.
"I was being urged to apologize and I have learned a lesson, which is to never apologize for something you didn't do. I regret my whole statement", he said, attributing the idea of the message to his publicists.
He also gave details about his family and described his father as a "white supremacist and a neo-Nazi" who didn't accept his sexual orientation, which was key to the actor's reserved character and his "hatred of fanaticism and intolerance", according to The Daily Beast and USA Today.
The accuser, known for his role in the series "Star Trek: Discovery," publicly accused Spacey in 2017, during the peak of the MeToo movement, and subsequently sued him taking advantage of a new law in New York that allows victims of child sexual abuse to seek justice years later.
