MAUREEN CALLAHAN: Kevin Spacey’s remorseless redemption tour

Kevin Spacey would like his old life back — to be uncancelled, as it were.

Good luck with that.

In the wake of the new docuseries ‘Spacey Unmasked’ — which began streaming in the States this week on Max, after its UK debut on Channel 4 — the disgraced actor is attempting a redemption tour.

Note to Mr. Spacey: Humility usually helps. Sincere apologies, or apologies that at least seem sincere, go a long way.

Resentment does not. Nor does claiming that you’re just a clueless guy out of step with the times.

Or that you’ve suffered enough, and if the rest of us don’t understand that — well, that’s our problem.

Here he was on Chris Cuomo Thursday night — just a couple of accused sex pests griping about consequences.

‘I know you had your own issues’, Spacey told Cuomo.

If you call using your perch as CNN’s primetime news star to smear your brother’s multiple sex-harassment accusers — sure, let’s call that ‘issues’.

As for Spacey himself, he feels he’s suffered enough. #MeToo, Spacey said, has ‘swung very, very far in the direction of unfairness’.

This documentary has its faults, chief among them interviewing men who, despite their claims of zero sexual interest in Spacey, either kept engaging with him or, in one instance, performed oral sex on him, all in the hopes Spacey could advance their nascent careers.

To my mind, these men are not victims. They and the filmmakers are doing a disservice to the more deserving complainants on display here, such as the young usher at The Old Vic who weeps as he recounts an emboldened Spacey allegedly rubbing his groin in his face.

‘I could smell him’, the young man says. ‘I could feel him getting pleasure by it. I froze . . . I couldn’t move. I just felt so small. I started to get scared of coming to work. Is it going to happen again today? . . . It still kind of haunts me’.

And there’s the younger actor who, on camera, claims that Spacey digitally penetrated him in front of photographers at the Old Vic, maneuvering them both so no one could get the shot.

Spacey, he says, whispered ‘Don’t worry about it’ in his ear, then ‘moved like a shark’ through meet-and-greets.

Perhaps there’s a reason Spacey is so good at playing psychopaths. Those dead eyes never quite do come alive, do they?

To be clear, there are a surfeit of allegations against Spacey. Those on the record here represent a fraction, yet the alleged pattern is established.

As one ‘House of Cards’ crew member plainly says: ‘The issue with Kevin was certainly well known.’

When one accuser speaks here of going to see ‘Saving Private Ryan’ with Spacey — and being shocked to see Spacey openly masturbate during the first twenty minutes, to the carnage at Normandy — well, that would suggest to me that we’re dealing with a profoundly dark, broken person.

Hollywood likely knew all along, too. But Kevin Spacey made a lot of people a lot of money. He won a lot of awards, two Oscars among them, and brought prestige to every project he was attached to.

No wonder Spacey can’t abide his exile. It says a lot that instead of using this documentary to express disappointment and disgust with himself, he’s trying to use it as his redemption.

It’s all quite sick.

‘If anyone thinks I’m going to give up on acting’, he told the Telegraph last week, ‘they have got me wrong on all counts’.

Well, sure — if Spacey wants to act in some black box in a nowhere town, have at it. But the decision to return to his former A-list glory isn’t up to him.

Nor is it up to the few Hollywood stars defending him.

‘Kevin is a good man and a man of character’, said Liam Neeson.

‘Vultures’ are to blame for Spacey’s circumstances, said F. Murray Abraham.

‘He is a genius’, said Sharon Stone. ‘He is so elegant and fun, generous to a fault’.

Ha! Nothing says ‘elegant’ and ‘fun’ like accusations of whacking off to young men shot to bits onscreen.

Please. It seems to me that if Spacey had faced allegations he harassed and abused young girls and women, these fading stars would be keeping their mouths shut — if not proclaiming the importance of #MeToo.

And this is to say nothing of Spacey conflating his coming-out with his ‘apology’ to initial accuser Anthony Rapp, a decision derided by the LGBTQ+ community — both for its convenience and the dangerous conflation of homosexuality and pedophilia.

Spacey’s timing was, at best, cynical.

Consider that within days of sexual harassment and abuse allegations, Spacey was swiftly dropped by his longtime talent agency CAA and his publicist. Director Ridley Scott — again, within days — made the almost unprecedented decision to cut Spacey from his finished film ‘All the Money in the World’ and replace him with Christopher Plummer.

Scott, while promoting the film, said he was ‘not completely surprised . . . I knew there’s a bit of a reputation.’

Netflix also quickly fired Spacey from its signature juggernaut ‘House of Cards’ — a show Spacey starred in and executive produced, one that established Netflix as an original programming powerhouse that invented the streaming-and-bingeing model.

‘I don’t think there’s any question Netflix exists because of me’, Spacey told Tucker Carlson last December.

‘I put them on the map, and they tried to put me in the ground’.

So dramatic!

More likely is the explanation given in ‘Spacey Unmasked’: the actor was reportedly found to have violated the streamer’s harassment policy. His behavior was a long an open secret, so much so that one crew member says female staffers were always placed close to Spacey, with the unspoken knowledge he would only harass men.

About that: After the first public accusation on Oct. 30, 2017, actor Anthony Rapp’s claim that Spacey made a sexual advance when Rapp was 14 and Spacey 26, the star did not deny it.

Instead, Spacey took to Twitter and offered a vague explanation, claiming no memory of said encounter.

‘But if I did behave then as he describes,’ Spacey wrote, ‘I owe him the deepest apology for what would have been deeply inappropriate drunken behavior.’

A jury found Spacey not liable in Rapp’s 2022 civil suit. As well, prosecutors in Nantucket dropped a felony charge of indecent assault and battery against Spacey in 2019, and last year Spacey was found not guilty of nine sexual assault charges in a UK criminal court.

But a Los Angeles court ruled, in August 2022, that Spacey must pay $31 million in damages to ‘House of Cards’ producers for, in effect, causing the end of the show.

‘They are acting like I didn’t get the memo’, Spacey told the Guardian last week. ‘But I got the memo for some of my fooling around, jokes and innuendos . . . one has to appreciate society has changed’.

Society hasn’t changed. It has never been okay to sexually harass, grope, violate, or otherwise predate with impunity, as Spacey is alleged to have done for decades.

This is the same Kevin Spacey who, on Christmas Eve 2018, released a video as he was about to be arraigned on felony sexual assault, facing 30 accusations and counting.

Called ‘Let Me Be Frank’ — an apparent allusion to his ‘HOC’ character, the sociopathic, murderous Frank Underwood — Spacey spoke in his character’s Southern accent and said the following:

‘I know what you want. Oh, they may have tried to separate us, but what we have is too strong, too powerful. . . . I showed you exactly what people are capable of. I shocked you with my honesty. But mostly I challenged you, and made you think. And you trusted me, even though you knew you shouldn’t.

‘So we’re not done, no matter what anyone says. And besides, I know what you want. You want me back’.

Hmmm . . . I think we’re done, no matter what Kevin Spacey or any of his celebrity defenders have to say.

As the old adage goes: When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.