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Now That Kevin Spacey Has Been Acquitted And Went Broke Doing It, Let The Guy Get Back To Work

Spacey's lawyers have proven quite adept at (eventually) swatting away civil and criminal cases alike. But those lawyers didn't work cheap.

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Kevin Spacey (Photo by Tim P. Whitby/Getty Images for Sony Pictures)

Because I have a cousin down there who’s always been generous enough to extend an invitation, I’ve been to Mardi Gras in New Orleans many times. On one visit some years back, I was dancing in the middle of Bourbon Street in front of a bar called Lafitte’s Blacksmith Shop.

Now, if you’ve never been to Mardi Gras, you must understand that a big part of the fun is wearing an outrageous costume. It’s not Halloween — these costumes don’t have to, and maybe shouldn’t, ultimately make sense. You wouldn’t bat an eyelash if a rollerblading pirate sped by, or if you ran into a space mermaid hanging out with a group dressed up as the cast of “Arrested Development.”

It was in this context that I happened to be wearing a pair of tight leather pants (it was during my biker decade) as part of my costume. The daylight hours dancing was going just fine in front of Lafitte’s Blacksmith Shop, until all of a sudden, I felt something tightening around my, well, how to put it? Let’s say ample leather-covered groinal bulge.

I looked down to see a hand coming around from behind me. The grip was quite firm, but not hard enough to hurt, and I froze for a second before realizing what was happening. I spun around to see a man at least 20 years my senior flashing me a goofy grin from beneath his Mardi Gras mask.

Alas, what exactly he said is lost to memory, but it was something along the lines of liking what he was feeling. Being a straight man who was not interested in this sort of thing, I stammered out something that probably wasn’t particularly witty and wandered away from the area.

I didn’t report this to any of the many police officers prowling the French Quarter on horseback. I didn’t run back to my cousin’s house in tears. It was uncomfortable, it was weird, and it was unwanted. Having taken criminal law and become a licensed attorney already at that point, I could even see how it could have satisfied the elements of one or two crimes.

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But my snap assessment was that this was a harmless, horny old man who probably never quite figured out how to romantically (and ideally more subtly) approach other men and made a bad decision in a party atmosphere. The incident didn’t particularly bother me beyond the minute or two of awkwardness while it was happening. I can understand how others who’ve endured similar things might feel differently, might even be angry or upset for a very long time, but I just wasn’t. It didn’t seem like a big deal to me.

I thought of this encounter when Kevin Spacey was first being accused of sexual assault by multiple men, because the allegations were mostly very similar to what took place there on Bourbon Street all those years ago. The age difference would have been about right. Could that have been a masked Spacey grabbing my crotch?

More troubling, to me, than the over-the-clothes groping was the allegation that Spacey had made a sexual advance toward a 14-year-old when he was 26. The thing is, though, when that former 14-year-old was all grown up in 2020, he sued Spacey civilly in federal court. The actor was not found liable on any counts.

In a separate incident, Spacey was accused of groping an 18-year-old at a Massachusetts bar in 2016. A case was brought, but the charges were dropped. Last year, the Oscar-winner faced a trial in the U.K. for allegedly sexually assaulting four men between 2004 to 2013. He was acquitted on all nine counts. Another civil case is pending in the U.K., but given that Spacey has beaten multiple civil and criminal cases already, it seems unlikely that this one would end any differently.

Of course, being acquitted does not necessarily mean someone didn’t commit the crime, only that there was insufficient evidence to convict them. Still, acquittals are a lot more persuasive than convictions in demonstrating someone’s innocence. There is also a lower burden of proof in civil cases, making those generally harder to beat for defendants, ergo beating them tends to mean a little more in demonstrating the underlying reality of events. At this stage, Spacey’s lawyers have proven quite adept at (eventually) swatting away civil and criminal cases alike.

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Those lawyers didn’t work cheap, though, and Spacey just gave an interview to Piers Morgan in which he teared up while discussing how the house he’s lived in in Baltimore since 2016 is being sold at auction because of his “many millions” in unpaid legal bills. He also admitted to “bad behavior” by “touching someone sexually in a way that I didn’t know at the time they didn’t want” and vowed to “never behave in the ways that I did previously, ever.”

Sure seems like Spacey has learned a lot from his tribulations. He’s certainly been humbled over the course of the past five years. Though the foreclosure sale of Spacey’s home has been postponed, he’s nonetheless wrecked financially.

Both as a lawyer, and as someone subjected to unwanted sexual touching, I absolutely do not think the guy who grabbed me in the French Quarter deserves to go to jail for that. No, he wasn’t a powerful actor or some kind of luminary in my industry (that I know of), but crimes and civil wrongs in our justice system are supposed to be based on what a person did, not who he is. At the end of the day, I don’t think that mysterious stranger owes me anything more than an apology.

The people calling for a pound of flesh from Spacey got it. Now that the guy’s been acquitted and nearly bankrupted in the process, isn’t that enough of this? Let him get back to work.

Jonathan Wolf is a civil litigator and author of Your Debt-Free JD (affiliate link). He has taught legal writing, written for a wide variety of publications, and made it both his business and his pleasure to be financially and scientifically literate. Any views he expresses are probably pure gold, but are nonetheless solely his own and should not be attributed to any organization with which he is affiliated. He wouldn’t want to share the credit anyway. He can be reached at jon_wolf@hotmail.com.

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