American actor, Kevin Spacey has denied, in court papers, that he is a sex addict.
Spacey, who finished making a yet-to-be-released, low-budget thriller Peter Five Eight last year, will bid to clear his name in court in New York next month.
In documents filed ahead of time, the disgraced actor said he did not seek treatment for sex addiction when he checked into a rehab centre in Arizona in 2017 after he was first accused of sexual misconduct.
He did reveal, though, that he was ‘as emotionally fragile as I have ever been in my life’, because he had just come out as gay.
At the time, Spacey had been fired from the Netflix drama House Of Cards; and U.S. website Buzzfeed had accused him of making sexual advances towards a 14-year-old aspiring actor.
Anthony Rapp, who is now 50, will face off against Spacey in a civil suit in New York, in which he is seeking $40 million for battery and infliction of emotional distress. In a deposition in the case, the actor was asked by one of Mr. Rapp’s lawyers if he was in ‘limbo’ in late 2017, after the Buzzfeed article came out with Mr. Rapp’s claims in it.
Spacey said: ‘There was a period of time where I did not know what was going to happen.’ He found out on Thanksgiving that year he had been ‘removed’ from House Of Cards, Netflix’s adaptation of Michael Dobbs’s political novel, in which he starred as Machiavellian Congressman Francis Underwood.
By then, Spacey had already checked himself into rehab in Wickenburg, Arizona. Asked what type of rehab he was undergoing, Spacey said he was ‘not sure what degree I’m able to talk about the work I went there to do’.
But he added: ‘I can only tell you that I was as emotionally fragile as I had ever been in my life. I had just come out [as gay], after having been private about my personal life for more than 30 years. I was being accused of things in the media and I went to go to take care of myself.’
Spacey was referring to a post on Twitter in October 2017 in which he said he did not remember the encounter with Mr. Rapp.
But he said if he did behave as Mr. Rapp claimed, then he would ‘owe him the sincerest apology for deeply inappropriate drunken behaviour’. In the deposition, the actor was asked if he was treated for alcohol addiction in rehab, but his lawyers objected.