Kevin Spacey’s accusers speak up: ‘He rubbed his groin in my face with families in the room’

The Old Vic’s pantomime production of Cinderella, written by Stephen Fry in 2007, was memorable for a few reasons. It had a moustachioed Sandi Toksvig holding forth as a flamboyant narrator and combined Plato’s meditations on happiness with bawdy bottom jokes. Despite some sniffy reviews, Kevin Spacey, then the theatre’s artistic director, described the risqué gags as being “a perfect celebration of the Old Vic’s vaudeville history and a great deal of fun”.

The production was not a great deal of fun for Danny De Lillo. The aspiring actor was then 22 and working as an usher at the storied south London theatre when, he alleges, he was subject to unwanted sexual behaviour from Spacey during a performance.

It had been a normal shift for De Lillo until his interaction with the two-time Oscar-winning actor. De Lillo says that he was seated in a small alcove at the back of the stalls when, midway through the show, Spacey came into the back of the theatre – and squeezed in beside him. At this point, De Lillo claims, the star thrust his crotch towards his face while he was seated. He recalls feeling Spacey become aroused while doing so.

“I remember him getting closer and closer and, all of a sudden, he was wedged in between me and the wall. I still remember the smell of…  where his groin was leaned in against me. And I just remember I was very still,” he says. “People would come into the auditorium and talk to him about how much they loved him. And I’m like, ‘What is happening right now?’ I couldn’t look, I couldn’t move.”

He adds: “He was in this cove with me, and there with his groin rubbing against [me].” De Lillo pauses to touch his clavicle. “Right here. In the dark, with families in the room, and he’s laughing at the pantomime and I’m just there – frozen.”

De Lillo cannot tell how long the incident lasted, but says he was traumatised by it. “That day just took so much away from me, from who I was, what I believed, how I viewed celebrities, how I wondered if this is an industry I wanted to be part of.”

De Lillo, now 39, is one of 10 men who have come forward to publicly accuse Spacey of inappropriate behaviour in an apparent pattern spanning five decades, from when the actor was at school to the height of his powers on Netflix’s House of Cards. The men lay out their claims in a two-part documentary series, Spacey Unmasked, that will be broadcast on Channel 4 on Monday and Tuesday.

Spacey has not directly addressed the new allegations. He said on Thursday that he had “repeatedly requested that Channel 4 afford me more than 7 days to respond to allegations made against me dating back 48 years and provide me with sufficient details to investigate these matters. Channel 4 has refused on the basis that they feel that asking for a response in 7 days to new, anonymized and non-specific allegations is a “fair opportunity” for me to refute any allegations made against me”.

In a post on X, he added: “I will not sit back and be attacked by a dying network’s one-sided “documentary” about me in their desperate attempt for ratings. There’s a proper channel to handle allegations against me and it’s not Channel 4.

“Each time I have been given the time and a proper forum to defend myself, the allegations have failed under scrutiny and I have been exonerated.” Channel 4 says that “Kevin Spacey has been given sufficient opportunity to respond” to the allegations raised in its films.

The youngest of three children, De Lillo grew up in Oxfordshire and knew he wanted to act from an early age. He studied at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York — alumni of which includes Anne Hathaway, Paul Rudd and Danny DeVito — and moved back to the UK after graduating because he could not get an American visa. Back in London, he was employed by an agency and deployed to the Old Vic after doing shifts at venues including the Royal Festival Hall.

He had seen Spacey, who was in post between 2004 and 2015, around the theatre but had not spoken with him before the alleged incident during Cinderella. “He had such a power and a presence,” says De Lillo. “The room stopped when he walked in, no matter where he was.”

De Lillo also alleges that, on one occasion, Spacey put his hand down his trousers while he was holding drinks for a party at the OId Vic. “I was like, ‘What’s going on, what’s happening right now?’ It was very quick,” he says.

He became resigned to thinking this is what happens if you want to pursue your acting dream. “You start to feel like you deserve this, you tell yourself this is what happens,” De Lillo says. “I was new to the industry [and thought] ‘Well, this is just normal, I guess I have got to put up with this’.”

De Lillo reckons that Spacey, who is 25 years his senior, relished the power imbalance. “It takes a certain kind of person to do this, not behind-closed-doors but out in the open. All my interactions with Kevin Spacey was whilst I was working on my job,” he adds. “There was no situation of me learning my lines with him or asking for advice. This was whilst I was working a minimum wage job at his theatre as a 22-year-old. There was never a moment when I wasn’t on the clock in my interactions with him.” The only time De Lillo says he saw Spacey outside the theatre was when he was sitting in a café and the actor saw him through a window as he walked past and knocked by way of greeting.

De Lillo did not report Spacey’s behaviour to the Old Vic at the time, or the police, because he worried that his word would not be believed over that of an esteemed actor. He did not quit because he needed to pay his rent on a flat off the Edgware Road. Instead, he requested that he not work in the stalls any longer. “I just did everything in my power to avoid, avoid, avoid, which I think is what a lot of people do in those situations,” he says. “They try to avoid the situation, essentially. But I didn’t tell anyone.”

Spacey has been dogged by claims of sexual misconduct since the #MeToo movement exploded in October 2017. The first to accuse him was fellow actor Anthony Rapp, who said that a drunk Spacey had made a sexual advance towards him when he was 26 and Rapp was 14. Spacey said he did not remember the encounter, “but if I did behave as he describes, I owe him the sincerest apology for what would have been deeply inappropriate drunken behaviour”. More than a dozen others have also come forward with their own claims.

“Anthony Rapp became my hero,” says De Lillo. “That was the time when things started to change for me. It was the first time I got confidence knowing that I wasn’t the only one, and that’s significant for anyone.” De Lillo only told his mother what had happened to him after Rapp’s revelations in 2017 because he “didn’t want her to go through that pain and experience”.

Following Rapp’s claims, the Old Vic opened a confidential hotline where people could raise concerns about Spacey’s behaviour. De Lillo was one of scores of people to contact the theatre. “The Old Vic apologises wholeheartedly to the people who told us that they have been affected,” Kate Varah, then the executive director, said at the time. “We’ve learned that it is not enough to have the right process in place. Everyone needs to feel able to speak out no matter who they are.”

Spacey, 64, has always denied any wrongdoing, but has, in effect, been cancelled as a result of the allegations that have emerged. This was most evident when Ridley Scott reshot all of Spacey’s scenes in All The Money in The World, his 2017 biopic of American oil tycoon John Paul Getty, at great expense with Christopher Plummer in the lead role.

Spacey has never been convicted of a crime and a $40 million (£32 million) civil suit brought by Rapp failed in 2022. He was also acquitted of nine charges — including sexual assaults and indecent assaults — brought by four men at Southwark Crown Court last July. None of the men in the Channel 4 documentaries were involved in the trial.

De Lillo, who has lived in Los Angeles for more than a decade, says he vividly remembers feeling deflated when he heard the London jury’s verdict. “My life got crushed at that moment because I lost faith in humanity,” he says. “I lost faith in justice. I shivered in a little ball. I wanted to hide for a while.”

Dorothy Byrne, the former head of Channel 4 news, is executive producer on the pair of films. Byrne says that she had been struck in the making of the documentaries that “men are embarrassed to talk publicly about being the victim or recipient of inappropriate behaviour, whereas in my experience now women are not embarrassed. I am not embarrassed. Some heterosexual men find it embarrassing to talk about it, as if it would in some way, reflect on or undermine their manliness”. By having ten different men on camera telling their stories, she claims, it will be a “turning point, and I believe it will empower other men”.

After all these years, De Lillo says he has chosen to speak out now because as a producer in Hollywood who campaigns for proper safeguarding at work, he wants to continue the momentum from the #MeToo campaign.

“It’s really hard for people to come forward. I’m so scared of people judging me before I’ve even set foot out there,” he says. “I know my truth, and I do not want to suffer in silence anymore.”

Spacey Unmasked is on Channel 4 at 9pm on Monday and Tuesday

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