by - “Rent” actor Anthony Rapp testified Friday in his lawsuit against Kevin Spacey.
- Rapp described Spacey making an unwanted sexual advance toward him at a party when Rapp was 14 years old.
- Rapp said he froze when Spacey laid on top of him. “It was very scary,” she said.
Anthony Rapp has described the “pretty scary” moment actor Kevin Spacey made an unwanted pass at a party in 1986 when Rapp was a minor.
Spacey is currently on trial in Manhattan federal court after Rapp sued him in 2020 over the alleged decades-old incident. Rapp is asking the jury to award him $40 million in damages. Spacey has denied any wrongdoing.
As Spacey watched intently from the defense table, a composed Rapp took the stand Friday, telling the jury how Spacey touched him inappropriately at a party at Spacey’s Manhattan apartment in the spring of 1986.
Rapp said he attended the party alone, but felt awkward when he showed up and didn’t know anyone except Spacey. Rapp testified that he had recently met Spacey after both were performing on Broadway at the time. Rapp was 14 at the time and estimates he was 5’4″ or 5’5″ tall and about 100 pounds.
Feeling uncomfortable at the party, Rapp went to a bedroom to watch TV, and at one point Spacey entered, “unsteady” and “glassy-eyed.”
Kevin Spacey.
ANGELA WEISS/AFP via Getty Images
Rapp said Spacey picked him up, touching his buttocks in the process, and laid him on the bed he’d been sitting on seconds before.
“He held me like a groom holds a bride over the threshold,” Rapp said.
Spacey then laid on top of him, his groin pressed against Rapp’s hip.
“I didn’t know what was going on or why,” Rapp said.
When that happened, Rapp said he “knew something was wrong.”
When asked if he said anything to Spacey, Rapp said no, adding that he felt “very cold.”
“I didn’t feel like there was anything I could do at the time,” he said.
Rapp said he managed to escape and went to the bathroom, where he took some time to recover.
Rapp said he knew he “had to get out of there,” so he eventually left the bathroom, passing Spacey on the bed, who continued to follow him as he walked toward the front door.
As Rapp was leaving the apartment, he says Spacey spoke to him for the first time.
“Are you sure you want to leave;” Rapp recalled Spacey saying.
On the drive home, Rapp said he was thinking “how am I going to recover from this?”
“It was an incredibly upsetting and scary experience. I just tried to pull myself together and get home as safely as possible,” Rapp said.
Rapp was living with his mother at the time and said he didn’t tell her because he wasn’t ready to talk about sex with her and he liked the independence he had.
When asked by his attorney to explain why this was a big deal, Rapp said it shouldn’t have happened to a child.
“I was this 14-year-old kid and I had no desire to have that kind of experience in my life. It was incredibly scary and very disturbing. It was unlike anything else I had ever experienced in the theater community. It disrupted the sense of belonging to this community. I’m fortunate that this 14-year-old boy had the wherewithal to come forward … but I would say he should never have gone through this in the first place,” Rapp said.
Rapp’s friends Christopher Denny and Sean Snow, who he told about the Spacey incident years later, also testified Friday and largely repeated Rapp’s story as he had previously told it.
Rapp first went public with the story in an interview with BuzzFeed News in 2017, during the Me Too movement. More men came forward after Rapp with similar accusations against Spacey.
Spacey was fired from his role on the Netflix show “House of Cards” and cut from the movie “All the Money in the World” following the allegations.
He is due to stand trial in June for sexual assault in the UK. He has pleaded not guilty to the charges, which stem from the accounts of three men.
Rapp is set to continue testifying when the trial resumes next week.
