Kevin Spacey is back in the news.
Awhile back I wrote about sexual abuse allegations against him being dropped, he had been accused of groping a busboy at a Nantucket restaurant in 2016. The ensuing civil suit and criminal charges were dropped after the accuser pleaded the 5th Amendment during an evidentiary hearing. It was found that the accuser’s mother had altered text messages on his phone prior to the phone being turned over to police.
Now, Spacey is back in the news after an anonymous massage therapist who had accused Spacey of forcing him to grab his genitals and trying to kiss him during a massage session in Malibu in Oct. 2016, recently died of cancer.
According to a death notice filed in federal court on Tuesday, the plantiff’s attorneys had notified Spacey’s attorneys that their client had “recently passed”.
The Malibu civil case was to have taken place June 2020 in federal court. The accuser’s attorneys had also planned to bring in 2 other anonymous massage therapists who also claimed to have been victimized by Spacey. The 2 therapists reported that they were fearful of having their names disclosed to the public.
Spacey has maintained his innocence in the matter and his attorneys said the accuser had not been able to substantiate his allegations nor give details as to when and where the alleged incident occurred.
In the meantime, Genie Harrison, attorney for the accused has chastised Spacey’s defense team for filing the notice in court stating that they did so for “tactical advantage”. (There is no court deadline for filing a party’s death notice but filing starts a 90-day countdown. Unless the estate for the party is substituted in the legal case, the court can dismiss the case.)
The accuser’s attorney found the timing of the public filing “undignified, insensitive and inappropriate”, since it came in the midst of the accuser’s family still trying to deal with the shock of their loved one’s death. The attorney stated that “the family will now have to open his estate at the same time as planning a funeral and processing their grief.”
Were Spacey’s attorneys wrong for setting the ticking clock in motion so quickly? Were they taking unfair advantage of a family’s grief?
It’s been said “all’s fair in love and war”.
This is war.
Accusations of sexual abuse, especially those by anonymous accusers, is a battle that one needs to prepare for by whatever means necessary. Mr. Spacey’s legal team did what they were hired to do, they did what was in the best interest of their client.
Wouldn’t the other side have done the same thing if the situation were reversed?
Isn’t that a defense attorney’s job? Do whatever they legally can to defend their client?
Doing anything else would be ineffective counsel.
Doing anything else would also show compassion for someone you are claiming is lieing and trying to ruin your life.
There is no option here.
Spacey’s lawyers are obligated to take advantage of any legal remedy available to them without any obligation to delay taking those actions. It’s a completely ridiculous suggestion that their timing was “insensitive, offensive” or otherwise. The legal justice system is very purposefully an adversarial one and any attorney not fully embracing a role adversarial to the prosecution is a bad attorney. We’ve been hearing ignoramuses deploring defense attorneys and a vigorous defense increasingly for decades. They have no idea of the imperatives of a just justice system.