Sharon Stone Says People Hate Kevin Spacey More Because He is Gay

 

Eboni Boykin-Patterson

{DB}Daily beast

Sharon Stone is still going to bat for Kevin Spacey.

The actress used part of her interview in a new profile for The Hollywood Reporter to defend the actor after she’d already written a statement of support for him to The Telegraph (along with Liam Neeson and several others), pleading for the actor to no longer be blacklisted. She wasn’t ignorant to the backlash for the statement, she said—“People were mad at me about that”—but she’s got more to say.

“After being in therapy for seven years, not being allowed to work, losing his home, losing everything, he should be allowed to come back,” Stone told the magazine. “He’s reached out to everybody he’s offended and said he’s sorry.” Stone went on to say that Spacey’s sexuality is more likely the cause of his ostracization than the allegations of assault and attempted rape made against him.

Spacey’s career came crashing down in 2017 when actor Anthony Rapp came forward to accuse the actor of assaulting him at a party when he was 14 years old. Over a dozen more accusers would follow, leading to the highly publicized U.K. trial in 2022, where he was charged with four counts of sexual assault and one count of causing a person to engage in penetrative sexual activity without consent.

Spacey was acquitted the following year, and jurors also sided with him in the subsequent New York trial in the case brought by Rapp, finding that Spacey had not molested the then-young teen—who still stands by his recollection of events. Spacey admitted in a sit-down with Piers Morgan in June that he had touched people “sexually in a way that I didn't know at the time they didn't want.” He hasn’t returned to acting in any major U.S. productions since Netflix dropped him from House of Cards following the 2017 allegations, which Stone told THR is unfair.

Since Spacey hasn’t been publicly accused of succeeding at committing rape, she said, perhaps there’s another reason why the industry won’t cut him some slack. “Nobody [has publicly said] he’s raped them or forced them into a sexual encounter. But there’s so much hatred for him because in his case it was man-on-man. That’s why he’s not allowed to come back. Because he offended men.”

Stone is not alone in her opinion that Spacey should be embraced again by Hollywood at large following his acquittals. Liam Neeson wrote in his letter of support, “Kevin is a good man and a man of character” and “our industry needs him and misses him greatly.” Actor Stephen Fry told the paper that the accusations “do not add up to crimes” and questioned whether the documentary relaying them was “justified.”

Despite how vocal Stone herself has been in recent years with calling out inappropriate behavior in the entertainment industry, she still thinks grabbing people by their privates is par for the course in their line of work. “Can I tell you how many men have grabbed my genitals in my lifetime?” she said in the interview, “A lot more than Kevin Spacey has grabbed men’s genitals. And none of them has ever apologized to me.”