Kevin Spacey’s attorneys have reportedly requested that he be allowed to skip his arraignment for sexual assault charges next month for undisclosed reasons.
Spacey has been ordered to appear in Massachusetts’ Nantucket District Court on Jan. 7 for a felony sexual assault charge. According to a report by Deadline, his lawyers filed a motion on Friday asking that he be allowed to skip the proceeding, and that they be allowed to speak on his behalf. The judge did not immediately rule on the request.
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The prosecutors in the case were opposed to the motion. Cape and Islands Assistant District Attorney Michael Giardino argued that Spacey’s physical presence is required in a criminal case according to Massachusetts state rules.
The alleged assault took place in 2016. Spacey is accused of groping an 18-year-old man at a bar in Nantucket for several minutes. The alleged victim is the son of local TV reporter Heather Unruh, and he claims to have recorded the attack in a Snapchat video. He sent the footage to his girlfriend as proof.
The video is mentioned in both the criminal complaint and the Massachusetts State Police report.
Still, in spite of this potentially damning evidence, Spacey seems confident. On the same day that his arraignment was announced, the actor released a bizarre video on YouTube. it showed Spacey delivering a monologue in character as Frank Underwood, his former persona on Netflix‘s House of Cards.
“You wouldn’t believe the worst without evidence, would you?” Spacey asked in the clip. “You wouldn’t rush to judgments without facts, would you? Did you?”
The whole video seems designed to apply to both Spacey’s real life scandals and the crimes of Underwood on the show. In addition to implying that Spacey is innocent, it attempts to re-frame the ending of House of Cards, suggesting that Frank Underwood somehow survived.
The monologue was about three minutes long, and included lines that offended many sexual assault survivors. Among them was Spacey’s assertion that “in life and art, nothing should be off the table.”
“If I didn’t pay the price for the things we both know I did do, I’m certainly not going to pay the price for things I didn’t do,” he added.
Spacey’s arraignment is set for Jan. 7, 2019. So far, a judge has not ruled on whether he must attend in person or not.
