Kevin Spacey said he struggled to come out as gay because of his father’s racist, anti-Semitic, and homophobic views.
“My father was a white supremacist and neo-Nazi,” Spacey said of his father, Thomas Fowler. “I’ve never really talked about these things in public at all.”
“I grew up in a very complex family dynamic,” he added.
The admission came at the witness stand in New York City on Monday as Spacey faces Anthony Rapp in a $40 million civil lawsuit. Rapp claims that Spacey made unwanted sexual advances against him in 1986 when Rapp was 14 years old. In his private testimony, Rap accused Spacey of fraud because he was not openly gay.
“To call someone a fraud is to say that someone is living a lie,” Spacey said. “I wasn’t living a lie. I was reluctant to talk about my personal life.”
Growing up, Spacey said his family moved around a lot because his father was often unemployed. He said he was “terrified” as a child and “forced to listen” to his father’s racist and bigoted lectures, which prevented him from bringing friends home. He said when he told his father that he wanted to be an actor, he was told “Don’t be a worrisome word.”
“I won’t say it here because it’s insulting,” Spacey said. “I definitely had some degree of shame.”
He said he was inspired to become an artist because he loved making his mother, Kathleen, laugh and because she instilled a love of movies in her son.
Spacey was one of the most popular actors in Hollywood, winning an Academy Award for his work in “The Usual Suspects” and “American Beauty” and starring in the Netflix series “House of Cards”. But after the Rapper accused the star of sexual assault in a 2017 BuzzFeed article, and other accusers made similar allegations against Spacey, his career fell apart. At the witness stand, Spacey walked jurors during his early days as an actor trying to make it professional, taking them through roles in regional theater and his initial success as a member of Jack Lemmon’s revival of “A Long Day’s Journey into the Night.”
“I was broke,” Spacey said of that time period. “I had no future.”
Spacey’s legal team scored a major victory before the actor took the stage. Judge Louis A. Kaplan charges emotional distress against Spacey, who is now only facing battery charges. “I am not looking to repeat the damages,” Kaplan said.
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