Kevin Spacey appeared on Monday in a Massachusetts, Nantucket court for an arraignment on a felony indecent assault and battery charge that he groped an 18-year-old busboy at a local restaurant. A plea of “not guilty” was entered on his behalf.
A future court date was set for March 4, but Spacey’s appearance at that hearing was waived by the judge.
Spacey’s request to not appear at his arraignment hearing Monday was previously denied, with Spacey issuing a statement in an affidavit saying “that my presence will amplify the negative publicity already generated in connection with this case.”
The charges are connected to an incident reported in November of last year, when former Boston news anchor Heather Unruh accused Spacey of groping her then 18-year-old son at a Nantucket bar in 2016. In 2017, Unruh claimed in a press conference that her son was at the bar The Club Car in Nantucket where Spacey purchased alcohol for him until he was drunk and then reached into her son’s pants and grabbed his genitals. She added that Spacey then urged her son to come with him to an after-hours party to drink more, but he fled the bar when Spacey excused himself to use the bathroom.
Court documents reveal that investigators have obtained Snapchat footage of the incident taken by the victim, though Spacey’s attorneys contend that the footage is not incriminating.
Spacey faces other criminal investigations into accusations of sexual assault in Los Angeles and London. The accusations, which surfaced last year, led to Netflix removing Spacey from the final season of “House of Cards,” while director Ridley Scott reshot all of Spacey’s scenes for the film “All the Money in the World” with Christopher Plummer in the role.
On Dec. 24, within hours of Spacey’s charges becoming public, the actor released a video on social media in which he defended himself while in character as Frank Underwood, his character from Netflix’s “House of Cards.”