Kevin Spacey won two Oscars, ran one of London’s most prestigious theaters, and became one of the most powerful actors in Hollywood — then, in the span of a few weeks in late 2017, lost all of it. The accusations that came after Anthony Rapp’s story broke were numerous, the career collapse was immediate, and the cultural verdict felt permanent. But every criminal charge that went to a jury ended the same way: not guilty. Now he’s at Cannes 2026, and the question his reappearance forces back into the room is the one nobody fully resolved the first time.
What the Accusations Were — and How Many There Were
It started with Anthony Rapp, who told Buzzfeed News in October 2017 that Spacey had made a sexual advance toward him at a party in 1986, when Rapp was 14 years old and Spacey was 27. Spacey’s response — issuing an apology while simultaneously coming out as gay — drew immediate criticism for conflating the two, as if his sexuality were relevant to an allegation involving a minor. The backlash was swift and total: he was fired from House of Cards mid-production, cut entirely out of All the Money in the World (a finished film, reshot in nine days with Christopher Plummer), and dropped by his agency and publicist within weeks.
What followed was a wave of additional allegations from men who said they had experienced groping, unwanted advances, or more serious assaults — many in professional settings, either on set or during his decade-long tenure as artistic director of the Old Vic Theatre in London. Accusations spanned roughly three decades. By 2018, Spacey was facing criminal investigations on both sides of the Atlantic, and the volume of allegations had made him, in the public mind, a symbol of the unchecked power the #MeToo movement had set out to expose.
The Trials, the Verdicts, and Why Each Case Fell Apart
The legal record is more complicated than most people remember, because most people stopped paying attention once the cultural verdict was in.
In the United States, the highest-profile civil case was brought by Anthony Rapp himself. A jury found Spacey not liable in October 2022. The case hinged on whether the jury believed Rapp’s account of what happened at that party in 1986 — and they did not find sufficient evidence to hold Spacey civilly responsible. Criminal charges filed in Massachusetts — related to an alleged assault at a Nantucket bar in 2016 — were dropped after the accuser invoked his Fifth Amendment right and refused to testify. Other US investigations did not produce charges that reached trial.
In the United Kingdom, the stakes were higher. Spacey faced nine counts of sexual offenses involving four men, with allegations dating from 2001 to 2013. After a trial at Southwark Crown Court, a jury acquitted him on all nine counts in July 2023. The prosecution’s case relied primarily on the testimony of the accusers; Spacey denied everything, and the jury ultimately did not find the evidence sufficient for conviction beyond reasonable doubt. By early 2026, his record across every case that reached a jury or verdict stage was: acquitted or cleared.
None of this means the allegations were fabricated — the legal standard ‘not proven beyond reasonable doubt’ is not the same as ‘it didn’t happen.’ Statutes of limitations blocked some claims from ever reaching court. Others involved evidence that degraded over decades. The power dynamics that made many of the alleged victims reluctant to come forward sooner are exactly the kind of structural factors that juries are not asked to weigh. The acquittals settled the legal question. They did not, and were never designed to, settle anything else.
Cannes 2026 and the Comeback Nobody Agreed To
Spacey walked the red carpet at the Cannes Film Festival in May 2026 for the premiere of the French biopic De Gaulle: Tilting Iron — a film he does not appear in, but attended as a high-profile guest. He arrived arm-in-arm with model Vialina Lemann, posed for photographers, and smiled. It was a deliberate image: a man performing normalcy in the most visible arena the film world offers.
His presence there is not a Hollywood rehabilitation story — the major studios have not come back. It is something more ambiguous: a slow reclamation built on European independent productions, legal victories, and a circuit of appearances designed to remind people that the courts did not convict him. Whether that is enough to restore a career, or whether it should be, is a question Cannes itself answered by letting him walk the carpet, and that the industry will keep answering one project at a time. The conversation his reappearance restarts is the same one #MeToo never quite finished: what we owe accusers when the law doesn’t deliver, and what we owe defendants when it does.
- the actors Hollywood canceled after MeToo
