TV Kevin Spacey loses the legal battle against the producer of 'House of Cards' and must pay 31 million dollars
Kevin Spacey Reappears Publicly in Rome Two Years After Sexual Assault Allegation
A
Los Angeles Superior Court
judge on Thursday forced
Kevin Spacey
to pay
$31 million
to the production company
MCR,
responsible for the
House of Cards series,
as compensation for breach of contract and for the damages caused by his behavior during the filming.
The fine was approved by an arbitration court last year but the actor appealed the measure, although without success, because in his decision Judge
Mel Red Recana
stated that Spacey's lawyers had not shown that the measure was "as irrational" as they argued.
"They have failed to show that it is a tight case or that the compensation for damages was so completely unreasonable that it amounted to an arbitrary reworking of the contracts of both parties," he concluded.
According to The Hollywood Reporter
newspaper
(owned by the production company MCR), the arbitration court found that the actor had breached the terms of his contract with his behavior, since he was accused of sexual harassment by a production assistant.
The complaint came at a time when Spacey, winner of two Oscars for The
Usual Suspects
(1995) and
American Beauty
(1999), saw his career collapse in 2017 after numerous allegations of sexual assault came to light that he has always refused.
Following the complaint from the filming assistant, the production company eliminated Spacey's role in
House of Cards,
completely rewrote its sixth season and reduced the number of episodes from 13 to 8 to meet the premiere date announced by
Netflix.
For all these reasons, the company, responsible for other titles such as
Ozark
and
The Shrink Next Door,
alleged during the arbitration that the actor had not provided his services "professionally" or in accordance with his behavioral policies.
Regarding the rest of the complaints against him in the US, two cases reached the courts in 2019, but did not progress.
In
California,
a masseur denounced him for a sexual assault that allegedly occurred in 2016 but died before the Prosecutor's Office filed charges;
while in
Massachusetts,
a young man who had accused him of another assault in 2016 dropped the charges.
For its part, this process in the US has been carried out in parallel with the trial by which a British court charged him with five other sexual crimes committed in
London
between 2005 and 2013, to which Spacey pleaded not guilty on July 14.
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