“If I wanted to, I could have had sex with people all the time,” said Kevin Spacey in court this week. Cockburn isn’t sure how the disgraced actor thought that would land during his cross examination for his London court case, where he pleaded not guilty to a dozen charges that include sexual and indecent assault counts and one count of causing a person to engage in penetrative sexual activity without consent.
During his time in the witness box, the House of Cards actor had his final chance to convince jurors that he never assaulted anyone. The outcome of this case could affect whether he’s able to make a career comeback after sexual misconduct accusations. It isn’t exactly going swimmingly so far. During the questioning, Spacey denied that grabbing men by the crotch was his “trademark” move as he got increasingly grumpy towards the prosecutor who accused him of sexually assaulting four men. Spacey was asked about allegations he had grabbed a man backstage at a charity event in a theater.
“Absolute bollocks!” Spacey replied to titters from the gallery in the packed courtroom.
“Yes, because that’s exactly where you did grab him,” prosecutor Christine Agnew replied.
Spacey went on to testify that he never sexually assaulted three men, saying two of them shared consensual encounters with him and added that the crotch-grabbing allegation from a fourth accuser was a “clumsy pass.” He objected to “crotch-grabbing” to describe what he had done, adding, “I would say in my estimate it is not a grab, not a grope. It is a gentle touch.”
Elsewhere in Europe, a better defense would have been to say that his crotch-grabbing tendencies were nothing but a fun joke. One crotch-grabber has been let off in Italy after a court ruled that he was not guilty of groping a student because the act lasted under ten seconds, and was intended as a “clumsy joke”.”
The judges acquitted the accused groper, a sixty-six-year-old janitor, of sexual assault because the whole thing lasted “about five to ten seconds.” The then seventeen-year-old girl testified that she pulled up her trousers and felt a hand tucked inside them, and the janitor said, “love, you know I was joking.” During the trial the janitor admitted that he had done it, but “as a joke.”
It isn’t the first time the Italians have got into hot water over their touchiness. After New York governor Andrew Cuomo was accused of sexual harassment and groping by eleven women, his defense was that the women had misread the situation due to “generational or cultural perspectives,” or as Fox News characterized it, “I’m not perverted, I’m just Italian.”
