Spacey Unmasked: How Kevin Spacey used his position and power to coerce men into performing sexual favours

Three days before the two-part documentary aired, Spacey got his retaliation in first during an interview with Dan Wootton broadcast on Wootton’s YouTube channel.

“I take full responsibility for my past behaviour and my actions,” Spacey said, “but I cannot and will not take responsibility or apologise to anyone who’s made up stuff about me or exaggerated stories about me.”

He added: “I’ve clearly hooked up with some men who thought they might get ahead in their careers by having a relationship with me. But there was no conversation with me, it was all part of their plan, a plan that was always destined to fail, because I wasn’t in on the deal.”

Spacey reiterated that, whatever anyone may think about his behaviour, it “wasn’t illegal, and nor has it ever been alleged to have been illegal”.

At the very top of the first episode, the makers of Spacey Unmasked made a point of reminding us that the 64-year-old actor is, in the eyes of the law on both sides of the Atlantic, an innocent man.

In a civil case in the US in 2022 brought by actor Anthony Rapp, who’d accused Spacey of “sexually inappropriate behaviour” towards him in 1986 when he was 14 and the House of Cards star was 26, Spacey was found not liable for sexual battery.

After a four-week trial at Southwark Crown Court last July, Spacey was found not guilty of sexually assaulting four men over a period of several years.

And yet... there’s all that smoke that just won’t go away. Spacey Unmasked, which its producers see as “a #MeToo moment for men”, interviewed 10 men who accuse Spacey of sexually inappropriate behaviour.

Their stories span several decades. Most of the men are American, although the second part features accounts of Spacey’s unwanted advances to men working with him during his period in London (2003-15) as artistic director of the Old Vic.

None of the men were involved in the 2023 trial and all but one (the programme didn’t specify which one) had never before spoken in public about what Spacey allegedly did to them.

As in Leaving Neverland, the 2019 documentary about Michael Jackson’s alleged sexual abuse of young boys, a distinct pattern of behaviour — the groping, the lunging, the grinding his body into theirs — emerged from the individual men’s accounts.

Several of them referred to Spacey’s “dead eyes” and “soulless” expression as he forced himself on them.

Spacey was portrayed as a famous, powerful, influential man who used his lofty position to coerce young men into performing sexual favours, in return for a promise to help them in their careers — a promise he invariably reneged on.

It’s the same toxic power dynamic in which the many female victims of Harvey Weinstein found themselves enmeshed.

A young actor who played a member of the security detail to Spacey’s character Frank Underwood in House of Cards recalled how, on his first day on set, the star beckoned him to a private space for a chat, and immediately began groping his penis.

In what was possibly the most grotesque incident of all, another man told of Spacey masturbating beside him in a cinema during the harrowing opening scenes of Saving Private Ryan.

“Some of the most horrific war footage ever recreated,” he said, “and this guy is rubbing one out!”

With regard to why Spacey’s victims didn’t just walk away from trouble — or better still, deck him — one of them, a muscular ex-US Marine, said: “Your first reaction is not violence. You feel you’ve done something wrong. You’ve brought it on to yourself. You feel shame.”

The stories here were overwhelmingly credible, but I can’t help wondering if the documentary serves any real purpose.

None of the men seem interested in pursuing things further, which is perhaps understandable. Spacey is still the one with the power and wealth on his side. Maybe it’s enough for them to have their voices heard and, finally, believed.

In the end, though, a TV documentary is not a trial and viewers are not a jury. Without hard evidence of the fire, all that’s left is smoke.