Second actor claims Kevin Spacey 'groomed him' as a teenager

New allegations have emerged from an actor who claims he was groomed by Kevin Spacey when he was a teenager.

The man, now in his 50s but who was 17 at the time of the alleged incident, asked to remain anonymous, but has told his story on the ‘Victoria Derbyshire‘ show on BBC2.

Spacey was 26 when had met the young actor, named John for the purposes of the interview, while attending a summer acting school in 1984.

The ‘House of Cards’ star invited John to stay with him at his apartment in New York some weeks later, during which he became increasingly ‘affectionate’ towards him, taking him out around the city and later to dinner.

“He became affectionate in a way I certainly wasn’t interested in,” he said. “A hand on my thigh, or around my shoulder, sitting on the couch. Rubbing my arm. Like the way that a young couple would be affectionate with each other.

“And I’m 17 at the time. I’m not 14, I think there’s a difference there, I get it. But I’m vulnerable and there was no direct explanation of what was going on.

“It came time to go to bed, he indicated that one side of the bed would be mine, the other side of the bed would be his. I thanked him but told him I’d rather just sleep on the couch. He said ‘no, that’s ridiculous’.”

It was at this point that John says the mood changed.

“I said ‘no, thank you but I’m going to stay on the couch’. He got a little testy, told me he didn’t have any blankets or pillows. I said that was fine. It was an icy goodnight with the lights off, and I slept in my clothes on the couch,” he continued.

“I thought I was going to be kicked out in the morning, if not before. As I went to sleep, he was sobbing from his bed, which I knew well enough was likely meant to get me to respond in some way, which I didn’t, I just tried to make it through the evening.”

But when he awoke, he says that he found that Spacey was already there, and was lying on him on the couch.

“In the morning I woke up, his head was on my stomach and his arms wrapped around my torso, very affectionately, I would suppose. It certainly wasn’t aggressive, but certainly something I was not comfortable with as a heterosexual male. But not something I was going to jump out of a window over,” he said.

“He was in his underwear, I was fully clothed. I supposed it was some sort of New York theatre actor good morning. But it also made me very uncomfortable. He jumped up and said ‘let’s go get breakfast’, and we didn’t speak of the night before at all. We then went out and had a day in New York City, as what I would call friends. As a 17-year-old that didn’t really like to talk about feelings, it felt like everything was going to be fine.”

John confirmed that he did not believe that anything had happened to him while he had been asleep.

“No, I didn’t think that at all, I just thought ‘this is a strange way to wake up’. What I had felt was that I was being manipulated. And that I was in over my head. This was an adult, and I was not yet an adult, that’s what I felt,” he went on.

Spacey and John went on to have a day in New York, meeting various celebrities along the way, before Spacey took the teenager for dinner in a star-studded restaurant ‘like out of a cartoon’.

“And then back to his house, and more conversation about him, and more touching and affection and hugging and him telling me he thought he’d been misunderstood when we met that summer at the theatre.

“At this point I burst into tears, because I couldn’t articulate anymore what was happening to me, or how I felt about the situation. I was scared. And I would say, to his credit, he stopped. He backed off, he went to sleep, the next morning he made sure I got to the bus station. Perhaps he felt that he was in over his head. I don’t know. But we didn’t speak again.

“Later in life, seeing him rise to fame shortly after that time was weird to say the least. I never felt I had a claim to anything. I needed to move on. But again, to know that Anthony Rapp had his experience, and I know there are others who have had theirs, I feel like it’s important to have some good come of it. People should be alert and vigilant and speak out.

“If you ask me now about this incident, if I give Kevin Spacey the benefit of the doubt, he was very stupid with me. Or maybe he was predatory, or a little of both. Whatever the case may be, I was uncomfortable at best, traumatised at worst, but I’ve moved on from it.

“It’s been relegated now to perhaps the territory of a creepy anecdote.”

So far Spacey’s reps have not commented on the matter.

But it follows allegations from the actor Anthony Rapp, who claims that Spacey tried to force himself upon him at a party at his house in the 80s, when Rapp was 14.

Spacey has said he cannot recall the incident, but has nonetheless apologised for any alleged impropriety.

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