Speaking to BuzzFeed News, actor Anthony Rapp (Rent, Star Trek: Discovery) has publicly alleged for the first time that Kevin Spacey made sexual advances towards him when he was 14 and Spacey was 26. He claims that after a party at Spacey’s home, Spacey “picked Rapp up, placed him on his bed, and climbed on top of him, making a sexual advance”. He said, “he was trying to seduce me. I don't know if I would have used that language. But I was aware that he was trying to get with me sexually.”

While this is the first time Rapp has spoken publicly about the encounter, he says that as Spacey became a star, he started to get frustrated and angry and tell people (his friends, a boyfriend) about what happened. He said that “at that time, I wanted to scream to the rooftops, 'This guy is a fraud!'” He says that despite his relative silence, he’s felt able to come out about Spacey since the Weinstein allegations. “Not to simply air a grievance”, he said, “but to try to shine another light on the decades of behaviour that have been allowed to continue because many people, including myself, being silent”. He says that “part of what allowed the Harvey situation to occur was that there was this witting and unwitting conspiracy of silence. The only way these things can continue is if there’s no attention being paid to it, if it's getting forgotten.”

Following Rapp’s accusation, Spacey, who has deflected questions about his personal life and sexuality for decades, tweeted a statement. He said that he does not remember the encounter as it occurred so long ago, and that he owes Rapp the sincerest apology for what would have been “deeply inappropriate drunken behaviour” and that he is “sorry for the feelings” that Rapp “describes having carried with him all these years”. Spacey followed his short apology with a coming out, addressing the “stories” about himself and saying that he chooses to “now live as a gay man”. People were quick to point out how offensive his statement and consequent coming out was to not only Rapp but to the gay community at large for (among other things) its conflation of paedophilia and homosexuality.

Rapp isn’t the first person to accuse Spacey of this kind of behaviour, although he is the first to go on the record. At the start of the post-Weinstein allegations, a woman named Heather Unruh tweeted that Spacey had assaulted a loved one. In 2015, Gawker published a series of emails in which men accused Spacey of “aggressively” coming onto them.