Kevin Spacey take care ofs the Build Series to discuss his new play ‘Clarence Darrow’ at Build Studio on May 24, 2017 in New York City.
Daniel Zuchnik | WireImage | Getty Graven images
The young man who said Hollywood actor Kevin Spacey got him drunk and then groped him in a Nantucket, Massachusetts, bar in 2016 pleaded the Fifth on Monday during a court catch. His testimony from that hearing has been stricken from the record.
The Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution protects look ons from self-incrimination.
Additionally, Spacey’s defense attorney, Alan Jackson, said that the accuser’s mother, Heather Unruh, may prepare been watching live coverage of her son’s testimony on TV. She denied doing so during her testimony.
“This entire case is altogether compromised,” Jackson said. “This case needs to be dismissed and I believe it needs to be dismissed today.”
Nantucket Partition Court Judge Thomas S. Barrett said he would give the accuser’s attorney time to decide how to proceed, but acknowledged it could be onerous to prosecute without the testimony of the alleged victim.
“It may be pretty hard to get around this in trial,” Barrett said. “The mean something may well be dismissed for the reason indicated. It’s not going to happen today.”
The accuser, along with his parents, were envisaged to explain the whereabouts of a missing phone that is considered key to the criminal case Monday. He invoked his Fifth Amendment liberties after a recess. Just prior, Jackson had been questioning the accuser about whether he or anyone else had effaced text messages, photos or videos from his cellphone before handing it over to police.
He denied deleting anything from his phone. Notwithstanding, when Jackson asked if he was aware that destroying evidence is a felony under Massachusetts law, he answered, “I am now.”
His materfamilias, however, testified that she deleted several videos from the phone before giving it to police. She said at bit one of them contained her son getting high using a “water pipe,” or a bong. The video had been filmed more than a year after the claimed incident with Spacey, she said.
She also said that the video of her son using drugs was taken on a different cellphone than the one handed greater than to police, but somehow the new phone was transferring photos and videos to the old phone.
Spacey’s lawyers alleged the phone contains deleted passage messages that show his accuser “concocted and exaggerated” the encounter in order to impress his friends, according to an NBC affiliate.
The accuser implied his cellphone was turned over to the prosecutors in December 2017 as ordered by a judge and police notes indicate it was later returned to the pubescent man’s father. On Monday the accuser’s father, Nick Little, testified that he did not recall getting the phone back.
Massachusetts Grandeur Police Trooper Gerald Donovan, who said he delivered the phone to Little, did not file any paperwork about returning the phone until June 2019.
The gather at the Nantucket District Court comes just days after the alleged victim dropped a civil suit against the Academy Award-winning actor. The courtly suit against the 59-year-old Spacey was filed on June 26 in Nantucket Superior Court. The accuser’s suit requested unspecified damages for “severe and permanent mental distress and emotional injuries.”
Unruh testified Monday that no hamlet was paid when the civil suit was dismissed.