Massachusetts prosecutors yesterday dropped a criminal case accusing actor Kevin Spacey of sexually assaulting an 18-year-old man at a Nantucket bar in 2016 after the alleged victim refused to testify.

Prosecutors said they made the decision to drop the felony indecent assault and battery charge after the alleged victim invoked his right under the US constitution against giving self-incriminating testimony.

Spacey’s lawyers had previously accused the man of deleting text messages that would support the actor’s defence. The man invoked his Fifth Amendment rights earlier this month concerning the whereabouts of his cell phone, which was missing.

Spacey, who won an Academy Award in 2000 for his role in ‘American Beauty’, had pleaded not guilty to the charge. His lawyers had called the allegations against him “patently false”. Lawyers for Spacey (59) and the accuser did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

The filing of charges last year marked one of the relatively rare criminal prosecutions of the #MeToo era, which has seen mostly women reveal wide-spread patterns of sexual harassment and abuse in entertainment, business and politics.

The allegations emerged after another actor accused Spacey of trying to seduce him three decades ago when he was 14, leading Netflix to drop Spacey from ‘House of Cards’ and to his being erased from the film ‘All the Money in the World’.

Source: Read Full Article