Kevin Spacey’s estranged older brother claims their father brutalized his family so harshly they referred to him as “The Creature,” he revealed to the Daily Mail.
Spacey currently faces allegations that he tried to seduce Anthony Rapp when the Star Trek: Discovery actor was 14 years old, and that he sexually assaulted a relative of former news anchor Heather Unruh.
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Though he admittedly finds these claims against Spacey “disturbing,” the House of Cards star’s brother shared tragic details about their childhood and the abuse they faced in their younger years.
Randall Fowler, 62, said their father joined the Nazi party when he, Spacey and their sister Julie were children. He described Thomas Geoffrey Fowler to the Daily Mail as an “ultra right wing, perverted sadist of a father,” adding that he shaped his mustache to mimic Adolf Hitler’s and that he often whipped and sexually abused the eldest son.
Spacey’s brother said that he took the fiercest abuse from their father and that their older sister Julie also endured beatings before she ran away from home at 18. Spacey tried to please his father to avoid the abuse, Fowler said.
“Kevin tried to avoid what was going on by wrapping himself in an emotional bubble,” he continued. “He became very sly and smart. He was so determined to try to avoid the whippings that he just minded his Ps and Qs until there was nothing inside. He had no feelings.”
“There was so much darkness in our home was beyond belief,” he added. “It was absolutely miserable.”
Home life:
Fowler recalled that their mother was “disgusted” by their father by 1963, after she learned he had been abusing a teenage girl who was a relative.ย Still, she stayed with the family and didn’t question the way Fowler, Sr. ran the home.ย
As adolescents, Spacey and his siblingsย were forced to sit through dinnertimeย while their father lectured them on white supremacy, ‘debunked’ the Holocaust as a lie, alleged that Jews ran banks and Hollywood, and that “biocrud”ย would destroy the earth.
Fowler shared that his father would also force him to read diatribe while standing behind him with a riding whip, cracking him if he refused.
Spacey’sย elder brother recalled that his father brought him into a bedroom when he was 12 years old and said he was going to teach him about the ‘birds and bees.’
Ratherย than give a verbal lesson, Fowler said he began touching him. Scared, he yelled for his mother.ย ย
“She came right up and pounded on the door but Dad had locked it and he told me to keep quiet,” he remembered. “All of a sudden the pounding stopped. Mom had left. I’d never felt so abandoned.”
For the next four years, Fowler said he endured sexual abuse from his father.
Spacey’s childhood attitude:
As the abuse continued, Fowler said it progressed to be rougher and longer each time.
He admitted to rebelling from his parents as a response to the abuse, while Spacey “turned into himself” so as not to get in trouble.
His older brother recalled that Spacey would try to “cheer everyone up” by doing impersonations of Johnny Carson and other famous people as a distraction from their difficult upbringing.
“I constantly threatened my father that if he ever touched my brother, I’d confront my mother with what was going on and that would destroy the family,” Fowler said, adding that he took the brunt of the abuse so Spacey wouldn’t have to.
“He and I were very close because we had so very few friends,” he added. Fowler said he once thought about killing himself but stopped himself after realizing it would leave Spacey with no protection.
He alleged that their father ran a “house of horrors” in each of the 10 homes they lived in; he said they moved from Colorado to New Jersey and settled inย Losย Angeles.
In any of their homes,ย Fowlerย said the children were “trapped.” They weren’t allowed to have friends over to the house out of fear they might see the photos in their father’s office, where the walls were lined with pictures of naked men and women and adult images.
Fowler said he was briefly a boy scout, but his father made him quit when he found out the scout leader was Jewish, and Spacey was never allowed to join the group.
Spacey as an ’empty vessel’:
Fowler described their mother, Kathleen, as the breadwinner of the family. She worked as a secretary at a steady job while the kids’ father took freelance work as a technical writer on occasion.
Fowler said his mother knew of the abuse the children endured, but never tried to stop it.
When the children grew up, Kathleen wrote a letter to all three children, but Fowler said that rather than apologizing for the hurt they experienced, she “tried to justify” their father’s actions. She wrote that Fowler, Sr.’s own childhood was difficult and that while he shared his political views with the kids, he wasn’t trying to “foist” them upon his offspring.
Fowler said he confronted his mother in 1990ย about being aย bystander throughout their abusive childhood, but she “sat in stony silence,” he recalled.ย
When their father died at age 68, Spacey grew increasingly close to his mother, Fowler said, and his relationship with his brother became strained.ย
Fowler now works as a Rod Stewart impersonator and limo driver in Boise, Idaho, while his brother chose a life in the Hollywood and Broadway spotlights.ย
Private in his adult life, Fowler describedย Spacey’sย personality as a child as an “empty vessel” who only had a real relationship with his mother, he admitted in a previous interview with theย Daily Mail.
“Neither of us had a chance growing up with two such damaged parents,” Fowler said. “I went through three marriages and 40 affairs.”
Fowler admitted that his father’s actions scared him so much that he avoided having children of his own out of fear they would “inherit the sexual predator gene,” he said.
Allegations of misconduct:
Sunday evening, actor Anthony Rappย alleged that Spacey invited him to a house party in 1986, when Rappย was 14 years old and Spacey was 26.
The formerย Rentย star claimed they spent most of the evening watching TV in a bedroom, but toward the end of the night, Rapp said he and Spacey were alone.
“My memory was that I thought,ย Oh, everybody’s gone. Well, yeah, I should probably go home,” Rapp said.
Heย said Spacey picked him up “like a groom picks up the bride over the threshold. But I don’t, like, squirm away initially, because I’m like, ‘What’s going on?’ And then he lays down on top of me,” Rapp continued.
“He was trying to seduce me,” the actor said.
Spacey responded to Rapp’sย accusations in a two paragraph message on Twitter.
“I have a lot of respect and admiration for Anthony Rapp as an actor. I’m beyond horrified to hear his story,” Spacey wrote on Sunday. “I honestly do not remember the encounter, it would have been over 30 years ago. But if I did behave as he describes, I owe him the sincerest apology for what would have been deeply inappropriate drunken behavior, and I am sorry for the feelings he describes having carried with him all these years.”
He also used the opportunity to come out as a homosexual.
“As those closest to me know, in my life, I have had relationships with both men and women,” he continued. “I have loved and had romantic relationships with men throughout my life, and I choose now to live as a gay man. I want to deal with this honestly and openly and that starts with examining my own behavior.”
One day after the allegations of sexual misconduct were published, Netflixย announced that Spacey’sย House of Cards would be canceled after its sixth season.
