I couldn’t access the Hollywood Reporter link directly because it is paywalled, so I relied on other current court reports and background coverage of the same London civil proceedings and Spacey’s earlier cases to build this piece.
Kevin Spacey is facing a fresh round of civil sexual assault claims in London, where three men are suing the actor at the High Court over alleged incidents linked to his years as artistic director of the Old Vic theatre between 2000 and 2015. At a preliminary hearing this week, the court provisionally set a three-week window in October 2026 for the cases to be heard, three years after a jury cleared Spacey of related criminal charges in the city.
According to court documents, the proceedings centre on allegations by actor Ruari Cannon and two men granted anonymity under the identifiers LNP and GHI. All three say they were younger men who encountered Spacey through his work at the Old Vic. One claimant alleges he was deliberately assaulted on a dozen occasions between 2000 and 2005, while another says he suffered psychiatric damage and financial losses following an alleged assault in 2008.
At the hearing, Mrs Justice Christina Lambert set the 12 October 2026 start date as a provisional listing and said a later decision will determine whether the claims are tried together or consecutively. Lawyers for the claimants argued that a single trial would spare witnesses from having to give evidence multiple times, whereas Spacey’s legal team urged separate hearings and suggested that one claim could be moved to a county court because of its different circumstances.
Two of the three men were complainants in the 2023 criminal case at Southwark Crown Court, where Spacey was found not guilty of nine sexual offences said to have taken place between 2004 and 2013. In the United States, a New York jury in 2022 rejected actor Anthony Rapp’s civil claim that Spacey assaulted him in the 1980s, and the court later ordered Rapp to contribute to Spacey’s legal costs.
The new lawsuits extend a legal saga that began in 2017, when multiple men accused the two-time Oscar winner of sexual misconduct, leading to his removal from major projects and a multimillion-dollar award to producers of House of Cards in an arbitration over alleged on-set policy breaches. Spacey has consistently denied wrongdoing. In recent interviews he has said that legal bills and the collapse of high-profile work have forced him to live in hotels and short-term rentals, before later clarifying that he did not mean “homeless” in the usual sense of the word.
