According to CNN, eight current and former members of the House Of Cards crew have accused Kevin Spacey of “a pattern of sexual harassment,” with one former employee specifically saying he was sexually assaulted. That person was a production assistant on one of the show’s first few seasons, and he said Spacey’s general behavior was “predatory” on set. He accuses the House Of Cards star of “nonconsensual touching and crude comments” that primarily targeted “young and male” staff members.
He also says that he was asked to drive Spacey to the set once, and while they were in the car he allegedly “put his hands down the production assistant’s pants.” Later, Spacey allegedly cornered the assistant in a trailer and “made inappropriate contact,” at which point the assistant told him that he wasn’t “comfortable” with it. After that, he says Spacey became “visibly flustered” and left for the remainder of the day. This alleged incident came just a few months after the production assistant complained about sexual harassment from Spacey, but he says his supervisor’s solution was just to limit how often he’d be alone on set with Spacey.
The production assistant said that Spacey made the set a “toxic environment for young men,” whether they were in the cast or the on the crew, and he believes that “this type of predatory behavior was routine for [Spacey].” That claim seems to be backed up by the other House Of Cards crew members who shared accusations against Spacey, with one saying Space would touch him “in weird ways” and that he didn’t feel comfortable telling Spacey to stop out of fear of losing his job. Another said that he was never personally harassed, but that the alleged harassment frequently happened “in an open space” and “everybody saw.”
Netflix says that it was recently “made aware” of a single alleged incident of harassment from Spacey on the set—presumably the one from the production assistant, given the timeline—and though it’s “not aware” of any other alleged incidents, it’s investigating the situation. The streaming service suspended production of the show’s sixth season shortly after the original allegations against Spacey from Anthony Rapp came out, and it also announced that the show would be ending after that sixth season.
Media Rights Capital, the production company behind House Of Cards, seems to be taking a more active role in all of this than Netflix is, with the studio telling CNN that it has set up “an anonymous complaint hotline, crisis counselors, and sexual harassment legal advisors for the crew.”