Kevin Spacey charged with felony sexual assault, releases bizarre video as Frank Underwood

We’re just going to come right out and say it: This may be one of the weirdest fucking things we’ve seen while covering the news here. This morning, The Boston Globe announced that Kevin Spacey has been charged with felony sexual assault over allegations that he assaulted the teenage son of a Boston-area news anchor in a bar in 2016. There was a hearing last week, and Spacey is reportedly set to be arraigned on a charge of indecent assault and battery early next month.

Here’s where everything goes off the rails: Just as the sexual assault charge was announced, Spacey released a video of himself as Frank Underwood, his character from House Of Cards, speaking to the camera as he used to do on the show. In the video, he essentially says that you can’t always believe what you hear in the media, which is fine, but he peppers in references to getting cut out of the end of House Of Cards and makes vague allusions to having done bad things as if he is actually Frank Underwood and he’s just as frustrated by the fact that he got written out of his own fictional life story as he is about getting charged with felony sexual assault in real life.

It’s bizarre and chilling, but not chilling in the way that the House Of Cards monologues were, where he’s giving the viewer insight into the mind of a bad man. It’s chilling because it seems utterly inconceivable that someone could think it was a good idea unless they are completely disconnected from reality—a reality in which a whole lot of allegations have come out against Spacey since Anthony Rapp publicly accused Spacey of making “sexual advances” toward him when he was just 17.

According to Entertainment Weekly, Netflix was not involved in the making of the video and it has not issued any official statement on it.