The Spacey Fightback

by Sean Bw Parker (June 2024)

In a post on X, Kevin Spacey announced ‘I will no longer be speechless.’ This accompanied an interview with journalist Dan Wootton, which was itself a counter-move to a new Channel 4 documentary, Kevin Spacey Unmasked. Spacey had been twice exonerated in both US and UK courts on sexual assault charges against a handful of men, but the new documentary contained allegations going back 50 years.

These were not of the ‘violent rape, torture and murder of young boys’ variety concocted by fantasist false accuser Carl ‘Nick’ Beech, imprisoned for 18 years on multiple counts of perverting the course of justice a couple of years previously. They were more in the ‘stroked thigh, clumsy approach’ genre, seemingly more common the further the #MeToo movement faded into history.

In the Wootton interview, as in the British trial, Spacey was honest and open about his ‘in the closet’ past, drunken approaches, and ‘persistence.’ But as false allegations industry critic Jonathan King has pointed out in his A Victim Bites Back You Tube series, when now does persistence and persuasion become harassment and assault? It appears increasingly to be for the broadcasters and court of social media to decide, and the main offence has become being famous.

We need only check notes to find details of both Bill Cosby and Harvey Weinstein’s legal exonerations, grudgingly mentioned in the press, the implication being that it is the courts committing the sin rather than the potentially gross exaggerations of allegations. That the Weinstein trials have made casting couch culture a thing of the past is good news for the integrity of the much-loved craft of movie-making. That it led to a deluge of spurious allegations, money-hunting, the related Depp-Heard trial and long-tail of MeToo—i.e. deep distrust between the sexes—is moot to the point of being beyond discussion in an activist-led, partisan press.

Dan Wootton was cancelled himself after chuckling along with guest Laurence Fox when the latter said he ‘wouldn’t shag that’ in reference to an online spat with journalist Ava Santina (who had on a TV show expressed indifference to chronic rates of male suicide). GB News eventually fired Wootton after suspending him for months—but as his own comeback X post said, ‘I’m not that easily cancelled’ —shortly before hosting a string of high profile victims of false or exaggerated accusations.

Russell Brand had shown the way in indifference to mass-media pile-on some months before, when the Sunday Times and Channel 4 colluded on another documentary and about two weeks worth of front covers about Brand’s former sexual behaviour—back when C4 positively encouraged it. Since then. Brand had cleaned up, became a political truther and got baptised, but none of that staunched his (multi-million reach) contempt for a collusive media which had put investigating behind it in favour of instant moral judgment in line with culture war stance.

Cosby is now very old, Weinstein is still in prison due to an as-yet non-overturned conviction, Depp is being quietly gentlemanly in victory; but Spacey, having ‘lost everything,’ is determined to be quiet no longer. One of the tragedies of all this, as he and Wootton discussed, is that not even apology for something you haven’t done works any more—the judgment and profit is held in the algorithms, which are amoral and care not for human sympathy.

(Good) acting is a gift, and Spacey is truly gifted, he’s proven that to the world many times. He is hardly alone in having a messy past personal life, but he is he first to come back fighting following attempted career destruction in quite such an eloquent way. The war in the media is between socio-political stance (woke or anti-woke) and clicks and shares profits.

That is actually where the morality lies, not whether Spacey clumsily propositioned a young actor in 1978—but historically right-on Channel 4, fighting for its own life, seems happier to throw its own professional integrity on to the post-MeToo fire.

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