Speaking with BuzzFeed, actor Anthony Rapp has accused Kevin Spacey of making a sexual advance on him when Spacey was 26 and he was just 14. Rapp says he has barely told anyone since it allegedly happened in 1986, and he hasn’t spoken to Spacey at all since, but he says his “stomach churns” at the thought of Spacey’s success, and BuzzFeed says he “feels compelled” to come forward in light of the Harvey Weinstein scandal. Rapp also says he wants to “shine another light on the decades of behavior that have been allowed to continue” because of alleged victims staying silent.
Rapp, who was appearing in the Broadway run of Precious Sons with Ed Harris at the time, says he met Spacey at a post-show party at Spacey’s apartment. Spacey had just appeared in Long Day’s Journey Into Night and was starting to become a bigger star. Rapp was the only nonadult at the party—being 14—so he just hung out and watched TV until after midnight. Once he realized that everybody had left, he got up to leave himself, but then realized that Spacey was standing in the doorway, apparently drunk. Spacey allegedly picked Rapp up, put him on his bed, and got on top of him. Rapp says Spacey was “pressing into” him and “tightening his arms,” but he eventually managed to “squirm” away.
Rapp says he essentially pushed the memory down after that, choosing not to tell his mother about the alleged incident because “it would have meant a larger discussion about his own sexual orientation.” Weirdly, a similar thing happened in the Precious Sons, with Harris’ character drunkenly trying to seduce Rapp’s character, and Rapp believes that helped him “slough off” the traumatic event. Eventually, as he saw Spacey in more movies, he wanted to tell people that he’s “a fraud,” but other than an Advocate Q&A in which Spacey’s name was redacted, he’d only ever tell friends when Spacey’s name came up.
Now he wants to be more open about what he says happened, because “the oxygen in the room is there for us to really do something about it.”