"Who would have ever thought that honouring someone who has been exonerated in every single courtroom he’s ever walked into would be thought of as a brave idea?"

"The two-time Oscar winner went on to compare his exile from Hollywood to the blacklisting of screenwriters under Joseph McCarthy’s anti-communist witch-hunt in the 1940s and 1950s. “There are times when one has to stand up for principle,” Spacey said. “I have learnt a lot from history: it very often repeats itself. The blacklist was a terrible time in our industry, but we must learn from it so that it never happens again.”

Said Kevin Spacey, accepting a lifetime achievement award at Cannes, quoted in "Kevin Spacey won at Cannes — but Hollywood’s ‘sharia court’ finds him guilty/Industry insiders are conflicted as the Oscar winner, acquitted twice for sexual misconduct, plots a comeback" (London Times).

Also: "One senior producer said Spacey... deserved a second chance, but judgmental studios were still 'performing as a sort of odd sharia court, outside of judicial jurisdiction, pretending to be judge and jury on a hearsay whim.... So many lives have been ruined for no reason. Kevin Spacey received a not-guilty verdict.'"

"A lot of people really like him, so you’ll have a lot of people going, 'This is really cool.' And then you’ll have some people that’ll be like, 'What the fuck is he doing here?'"

"But hopefully the people who say, 'What the fuck is he doing,' when they realize why he’s here they’ll give him a second chance."

Said the producer of Kevin Spacey's new film, quoted in "Kevin Spacey to Make Surprise Appearance in Cannes to Accept a Lifetime Achievement Award" (Variety).

For the annals of Things I Asked Grok: "Tell me about the idea of a 'second chance.'"

From Grok's answer: "Christianity... emphasizes redemption through forgiveness, like the parable of the Prodigal Son. In Buddhism, the cycle of rebirth offers chances to correct past karma.... In stories, the 'second chance' trope is a classic—think redemption arcs in movies where the villain turns hero or the underdog gets a shot at glory. It’s compelling because it mirrors real-life struggles and the hope for a do-over."

In some of those second-chance stories, the second-chance getter goes on to do good things — Jean Valjean, Scrooge, etc. — but in other second-chance stories...

"Kevin Spacey Found Not Guilty of Sexual Assault."

The NYT reports.

As the verdicts were announced, Mr. Spacey, 64, stood in a transparent box in the middle of the courtroom, wearing a dark blue suit and looking unemotional as he faced the jury.

But when the final “not guilty” was read out, the actor, whose birthday falls on Wednesday, began to cry and sighed heavily with relief.

"A federal jury in Manhattan found Kevin Spacey not liable for battery... after the actor Anthony Rapp filed a lawsuit accusing Mr. Spacey of climbing on top of him and making a sexual advance when Mr. Rapp was 14."

The NYT reports. 

"And so I do have empathy for what it feels like to suddenly be told that you can’t go back to work, or that you might lose your job, and it’s a situation you have absolutely no control over."

"And so while we may have found ourselves in similar situations albeit for very different reasons, I still feel that some of the emotional struggles are very much the same."

"He made eye contact with almost everyone in the first few rows of the standing crowd. It was as mesmerising as it was slightly terrifying."

"It was clear that while he may have fallen from grace for the alleged sexual assaults he did not feel any apparent remorse."

Said the writer Barbie Latza Nadeau, quoted in "Kevin Spacey makes first public appearance since sex assault allegations with pointed poetry reading" (UK Spectator).

Spacey appeared in front of the Greek statue Boxer at Rest in Rome, to read Gabriele Tinti’s poem The Boxer... [which] contains the lines: "They used me for their entertainment, fed on shoddy stuff. Life was over in a moment" and "The more you're wounded the greater you are. And the more empty you are. I have endured no end of sleepless nights. I have spent hours and hours sweating to destroy and fall."

Here's the "Boxer at Rest" (cc by Livioandronico2013):

"As part of an extended podcast recently, I suggested that if closeted people were instead open about their sexuality they wouldn’t abuse others."

"That, of course, is wrong. My intention was to encourage the LGBT audience I was addressing to be proud and open about their sexuality. In doing so, my point was clumsily expressed. I would never, ever trivialize or condone abuse of any kind. I deeply regret my careless remarks and apologize unreservedly for any distress I caused."

Said Ian McKellen, backing off after criticism for observing that actor Kevin Spacey and director Bryan Singer "were in the closet" and "If they had been able to be open about themselves and their desires, they wouldn’t have started abusing people in the way they’ve been accused."

"Whether the speaker is a drawling Spacey in character as a secretly homicidal sociopath or a comedian who styled himself as a postmillennial cross between John Cassavetes and Alan Alda..."

"... while he was whipping it out every chance he got, a horrible truth still emerges. These types of guys thrive on attention, and if they can’t get the positive kind, they’ll settle for the negative. 'Oh, sure, they’ve tried to separate us,' Spaceywood said, inadvertently speaking for Louis C.K. as he emerged from his alt-right chrysalis and flapped his moth wings in Levittown. 'But what we have is too strong. It’s too powerful.' Unless it isn’t. This concludes the last thing I’ll ever write about Kevin Spacey or Louis C.K., until they’re sentenced in courts of law, or I have to write their obituaries."

Writes Matt Zoller Seitz in "The Real Louis C.K. Is Finally Standing Up" (The Vulture). So he's saying that even if there are court proceedings, including trials with witness testimony and announcements of jury verdicts, he won't write a word? He'll wait for the sentencing stage?

The idea is that Spacey and C.K. just want attention, so don't feed them, or you're part of the problem. I remember when I tried that with Trump. But silence is not like yelling. One person's silence only enhances the speech opportunities of other people. Yelling, you might drown other people out, but shutting up doesn't work like that.

Kevin Spacey puts out a strange video.

He's defending himself somehow, in a puzzling way. The title "Let Me Be Frank" refers to his "House of Cards" character who is named Frank. I didn't watch that show, but I assume he's adopting the persona. The lines, as I heard them, are challenging us to give him a fair process and indicating that he intends to rise from what has been social death.

Here's an article about it in Vox, giving some important context:

News broke on December 24, 2018, that the two-time Oscar winner would be arraigned on a felony sexual assault charge in Nantucket District Court on January 7. Spacey faces charges of indecent assault and battery connected to an alleged incident in a bar in July 2016, involving the then-18-year-old son of former Boston-area news anchor Heather Unruh. Allegedly, Spacey put his hands down the man’s pants and grabbed his genitals....

Frank Underwood is House of Cards’ antihero. He lies, cheats, and literally murders his way to the top, making his way over the course of the series from frustrated House majority whip to president. Unscrupulous to the end, Underwood is not a character anyone can trust — he never speaks the truth to anyone, except sometimes his wife Claire, if it doesn’t benefit him....

“I know what you want,” [Spacey says in the video]. “Oh, sure, they may have tried to separate us. But what we have is too strong, too powerful. After all, we shared everything, you and I. I told you my deepest, darkest secrets. I showed you exactly what people are capable of. I shocked you with my honesty. But mostly I challenged you, and made you think. And you trusted me, even though you knew you shouldn’t. So we’re not done, no matter what anyone says. And besides, I know what you want. You want me back.... They’re just dying to have me declare that everything said is true, and that I got what I deserved. Only you and I both know it’s never that simple — not in politics and not in life... I can promise you this... If I didn’t pay the price for the things we both know I did do, I’m certainly not going to pay the price for the things I didn’t do.... Wait a minute, now that I think of it, you never actually saw me die, did you? Conclusions can be so deceiving."

So what do you think of this choice to take on such a negative persona in a video presumably intended to advance his interests in response to the news that he faces criminal charges? If you had to argue this is brilliant, what would you say?

Time's Up! — after a week of shaming — for Mark Wahlberg (who didn't do anything wrong).

The NYT reports:

Mark Wahlberg and his talent agency, William Morris Endeavor, will donate $2 million to a fund dedicated to fighting pay inequity and harassment of women in Hollywood.

The donation will be made in the name of Michelle Williams, Mr. Wahlberg’s co-star in the movie “All the Money in the World,” after an outcry about pay discrepancy in reshoots for the film. Ms. Williams received a per diem of $80 for 10 days of work while Mr. Wahlberg negotiated a fee of $1.5 million. The two actors are represented by the same agency.

“Over the last few days my reshoot fee for ‘All the Money in the World’ has become an important topic of conversation,” Mr. Wahlberg said in a statement. “I 100% support the fight for fair pay and I’m donating the $1.5M to the Time’s Up Legal Defense Fund in Michelle Williams’ name.”

Why shouldn't I presume that the agency would get the best deal it could for all of its clients? I guess, going forward, anyone representing an actress will be able to get more based on the bad publicity potential of disparate pay. But in this particular case — as I understand it (hard to tell from the NYT) — Williams had a contract that agreed to do reshooting and Wahlberg did not. That put Wahlberg in a strong bargaining position, and the agency got him $1.5 million for the extra 10 days of work. Williams was stuck performing on the contract she'd already signed, which may have been the best deal for her at the time it was made. Who had any idea this strange calamity would hit the film? (Kevin Spacey became so toxic, his scenes had to be reshot with a different actor.)

"That sounds absurd, but, if Trump is our President, and our Treasury Secretary, Steven Mnuchin, is posing with a sheet of cash, who’s to say that [Gene] Simmons isn’t coursing through the body politic?"

"The book’s top Amazon review, at present, calls it a 'raw dose of reality.' And it does reflect a hard truth: that Simmons and his ilk have succeeded in yoking the nihilism of the rock age to a policing, rapacious conservatism. 'I made a living spitting blood, sticking my tongue out, and being as grotesque and horrifying as possible,' he brags. Were it written in the present tense, it would be the truest sentence in the book."

From "How to Get Power (and Banned from Fox News), According to Gene Simmons" by Dan Piepenbring in The New Yorker.

The book is "On Power: My Journey Through the Corridors of Power and How You Can Get More Power" — published last November. That's also when the New Yorker article was published, but for some reason the New Yorker is promoting it on Facebook this morning.

Since we're already talking about psychopaths this morning, let me quote this too:

In its most confounding passage, “On Power” finds a model in Frank Underwood, from “House of Cards.” True, Underwood is a murderer, but he exemplifies a kind of can-do psychopathy that Simmons admires. “If you find psychopaths terrifying, it’s likely because they are the most effective at the evil they do,” he writes. “So I would ask you to seize this power for yourself. . . . Be a psychopath with a conscience.” There is no such thing, of course, just as there is no such person as Underwood; there’s only Kevin Spacey, whose abuses of power have left him in disgrace.

"One wonders if the boy did not know what would happen. I do not know about you, but in my youth I have never been in situations like this."

"Never. I was always aware of what could happen. When you are in somebody’s bedroom, you have to be aware of where that can lead to. That’s why it does not sound very credible to me. It seems to me that Spacey has been attacked unnecessarily.... People know exactly what's going on [about Weinstein]... And they play along. Afterwards, they feel embarrassed or disliked. And then they turn it around and say: 'I was attacked, I was surprised'. But if everything went well, and if it had given them a great career, they would not talk about it. I hate rape. I hate attacks. I hate sexual situations that are forced on someone. But in many cases one looks at the circumstances and thinks that the person who is considered a victim is merely disappointed."

Said Morrissey.

ADDED: These remarks made me wonder how smart Morrissey is. My guess was that he's very smart, and he likes to look at things from different points of view and talk about what he sees, and that can get you into trouble, at least if your smartness doesn't lead you to see what you're going to get if you waft miscellaneous ideas where people expect you to say only one thing and you decide to protect yourself by keeping quiet.

I read the "Early life" section of Morrissey's Wikipedia page, and see that his parents were "working-class Irish Catholics," and he "failed his 11-plus exam" after elementary school "and proceeded to St. Mary's Technical Modern School, an experience that he found unpleasant." He was good at sports but still "an unpopular loner." He said his education was "evil and brutal," and "All I learnt was to have no self-esteem and to feel ashamed without knowing why." He did read a lot, we're told, including feminist literature and Oscar Wilde. And he turned to music — very successfully — as the solution.

Even here, music was a solution. Morrissey could have saved these ideas for song lyrics, which can be enigmatic, ambiguous, and seeming to arise from a character the singer embodies.

"I would like to talk to Kevin Spacey... I feel so sad, and I hate that actor that ruined this guy’s career."

"So, O.K., it happened 10 years ago . . . Jesus, suck it up once in a while!... I would like to ask [Spacey] how it feels to lose a lifetime of success and hard work all because of 10 minutes of indiscretion 10 years or more ago.... You know something, all of us in this room at one time or another did something we’re ashamed of. The Dalai Lama has done something he’s ashamed of. The Dalai Lama should confess . . . put that in your magazine!"

Said the venerable author Gay Talese, quoted at Vanity Fair, and of course, subsequently savaged on Twitter. As summarized at WaPo:

Esquire editor Tyler Coates played off Talese’s own quote, writing, “I’d like to ask Gay Talese how it feels to lose a lifetime of success and hard work all because he revealed himself to be a” sh— “person.”

“Petition To Force Gay Talese To Change His Name To Straightoldguy Talese,” tweeted NPR book and movie reviewer Glen Weldon.

“I could steal Talese’s car in less than 10 minutes. I don’t think he’d shrug it off,” tweeted one user.

“Oh dear, twitter’s gonna make Gay Talese wish he was trending because he died,” wrote one user.

"I was unable to process what was happening: My dad and I were pretending to be lovers in a play while Kevin Spacey was trying to seduce me..."

"... and all the while in real life I was a hapless, straight virgin who just wanted to become a famous actor."

Said Harry Dreyfuss, the son of Richard Dreyfuss, about something that happened in 2008, quoted in The Daily Mail.

ADDED: What was this play in which Harry was cast as his father's lover? It was "Complicit," by Joe Sutton, and directed by Kevin Spacey at the Old Vic in London. Here's the Guardian's 2-star review (from 2009):

[The] hero, Ben Kritzer, is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who, in the wake of 9/11, had written a powerful opinion piece advocating the use of torture in "the war on terror". Given hard evidence of America's brutal military tactics and disregard for international law, he has since undergone a change of heart and, thanks to a state department source, has published incriminating documents.

The key question is whether he will protect his source and risk prison, or, as his wife and lawyer fervently hope, save his own skin.... What we get is a three-way tussle over tactics between Ben, his wife, and his lawyer, interspersed with TV footage of an Andrew Marr interview. It is rather like being kept waiting outside the Colosseum while the Christians are being thrown to the lions...

Spacey's production is oddly cast. Richard Dreyfuss as Ben never seems on top of the material, and is given to prowling around the Vic's new in-the-round stage barking at people rather than conversing with them. He also seems five times as old as Elizabeth McGovern, who is sadly wasted as his wife. 

There's no mention of Harry Dreyfuss and what his character had to do with anything.

I'd like to write a play about an sexually predatory director who inserts roles for teenagers in plays that have nothing to do with teenagers. He lures famous old actors to take starring roles in productions they cannot really handle, and the old actor goes on — abysmally — because the offer included a role for his precious teenage son, who was eager to begin an acting career.

AND: I glossed over this set up for the quote I featured:

Harry writes that the three of them were in Spacey's London apartment, and that he and Spacey, now 58, sat together on a couch. Richard, now 70, was intensely rehearsing his lines and did not notice when, per the allegation, Spacey put his hand on Harry's thigh. Harry was helping his father rehearse by portraying his character's wife.

So teenage Harry was in Kevin Spacey's apartment, sitting on the couch with him and his father, and the way he got into this odd position — the position that gave Spacey a chance to grope him (with his father right there on the couch) — was that Harry was supposed to be reading the lines of the female character in the play. What a creepy set-up!

In his account, Harry describes how he got up to move to the other side of the couch, only for Spacey to follow him. He writes that he again moved to the other side of the couch and put his hands on his thighs. At which point, he alleges Spacey returned and slid his hand through the crevice between Harry's arm and leg. 'Over the course of about 20 seconds, centimeter by centimeter, Kevin crawled his hand from my thigh over toward my crotch,' Harry writes. 'Looking into his eyes, I gave the most meager shake of my head that I could manage.'

He describes how he did not want to alert his father because Spacey was his father's boss at the time. He also writes that he was worried about harming his own career. Eventually, Spacey removed the hand, it is alleged. Harry says is not sure how long the hand remained on his crotch.

How could Richard Dreyfuss not have seen this? How could Harry have allowed Spacey to crawl his hand slowly and ultimately come to rest on his crotch and remain there? The answer seems to be: career. The abject submission is chilling. Harry was 18 and capable of consenting to sexual contact. (This happened in London, where the age of consent is and was 16.) How was Spacey to divine that Harry wasn't consenting?

"I would call him [a sexual predator] to his face. I would call him a pedophile and a sexual predator."

"When I turned 25, I looked at every 14-year-old boy I could see, to try to understand what those men had seen, because I still on some level thought I had been a tiny adult. That whole year I was 25, I tried to just see the ones who were like six-foot-two, and 200 pounds — they all looked like children. They all looked like somebody who was 10 years old four years ago. Nobody looks fuckable. Nobody … I couldn’t conjure it up.... I know that pedophilia is a sexuality, like homosexuality. You can’t necessarily — you can’t be cured of it. It is in your brain. That’s one of the tragic things about it for those people. You can become someone who does not act on those impulses, but the understanding in the psychological community is … that’s your sexuality.... They make themselves beloved.... He is a pedophile. When you look at his statement, you realize also he’s profoundly narcissistic. He thinks this is about being caught that he’s gay. And then he is spinning it, right? 'Oh, people like gays now. So I’ll throw them that. I’ll say I’m gay and I will betray my whole community and do something else that conflates pedophilia with male homosexuality.' That’s great. Thank you for that. And that was probably the thing that made me want to talk more than anything else. How repulsive that was."

From "Man Comes Forward to Describe an Alleged Extended Sexual Relationship He Had at Age 14 With Kevin Spacey" (in New York Magazine's Vulture).

"Actor Anthony Rapp: Kevin Spacey Made A Sexual Advance Toward Me When I Was 14."

Rapp speaks now — after 30 years — "not to simply air a grievance... but to try to shine another light on the decades of behavior that have been allowed to continue because many people, including myself, being silent. … I'm feeling really awake to the moment that we're living in, and I'm hopeful that this can make a difference."

Spacey says he can't remember — after 30 years — but he remembers enough (or respects Rapp enough) to allow that it could have happened:

But if I did behave then as he describes, I owe him the sincerest apology for what would have been deeply inappropriate drunken behavior.... This story has encouraged me to address other things about my life. I know that there are other stories out there about me and that some have been fueled by the fact that I have been so protective of my privacy.... I now choose to live as a gay man.

As far as I've noticed over the decades, people were assuming Spacey is gay. Coming out as gay now, when confronted with behavior aimed at a 14 year old, is unfortunate. He's publicly identifying with a group at the point where there's something negative about his membership in it. It would have been better to come out when his fortunes were high and to add to the luster of the people you say are yours.

"I had no idea I needed to see photos of Kevin Spacey in giant pants on a scooter..."

"... but I really did need it."

Why should Ron Klain be the Ebola czar?

Seriously, what are the qualifications for this job... and what exactly does the job consist of?

Klain is highly regarded at the White House as a good manager with excellent relationships both in the administration and on Capitol Hill. His supervision of the allocation of funds in the stimulus act -- at the time and incredible and complicated government undertaking -- is respected in Washington. He does not have any extensive background in health care but the job is regarded as a managerial challenge...

A former chief of staff to Vice President Joe Biden and also to then-Vice President Al Gore, Klain is currently President of Case Holdings and General Counsel of Revolution, an investment group. He has clerked for the U.S. Supreme Court and headed up Gore's effort during the 2000 Florida recount and was portrayed in the HBO movie Recount by Kevin Spacey.

Oh, well, then, that makes perfect sense. Which Supreme Court Justice did he clerk for? And why not hire Kevin Spacey? I'm sure he'd do a convincing job of assuring us that everything is under control. He was excellent delivering lines like "The plural of 'chad' is 'chad'?" and Chad — coincidence?! — is a country in Africa.

And by the way, I thought we'd stopped using the job title "czar." We're back to the retrograde messaging implicit in the title of a long-ago Russian autocrat?

ADDED: It seems that Klain is called a "czar" because Republicans were calling out for a "czar." From The Daily Kos a few days ago:

Thus McCain, as usual, follows in the footsteps of the House crazy person caucus, but now the Republicans demand that Obama institute an "Ebola czar" even after those selfsame Republicans were muttering about abuse of power and tyranny and impeachment over the "czars" the gubbermint already had has been catapulted into the Sunday show orbits of Serious Debate, by mere virtue of Sunday John saying it. We don't have enough czars. We demand more czars! Why isn't Obama leading by appointing czars?

And now, here comes Obama, leading by following, appointing a czar. Or a guy to do whatever it is Ron Klain is good at doing who will be titled "czar." What the hell does a czar do? We'll find out when we see what Klain does. He's certainly good for something, like the way he allocated the funds of the stimulus act. We'll find out how that kind of expertise and orientation plays out in the ebola context.

AND:  The (unlinkable) OED defines "czar" only as: 1. "The title of the autocrat or emperor of Russia; historically, borne also by Serbian rulers of the 14th c." and 2. "transf. A person having great authority or absolute power; a tyrant, 'boss.'’" But there is a "Draft addition," lingering in "draft" status since 2001: "orig. U.S. A person appointed by a government to recommend and coordinate policy in a particular area and to oversee its implementation." The oldest use is, interestingly enough, beer czar:

1933   S. Walker Night Club Era 167   There are several versions of why Mulrooney quit the job to become the state beer 'Czar.'

The most prominent use of "czar" — where the term really took off — was "Drug Czar," applied to Bill Bennett in early 1989, as George H.W. Bush was about to take over the presidency. But it wasn't Bush the Elder who created the position. Congress did that, over the objections of President Reagan. As for the choice of Bennett, the biggest critic, amusingly enough, was Joe Biden:

''What concerns me most is his total lack of background in law enforcement,'' said Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr., a Delaware Democrat who is chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee.

IN THE COMMENTS: Ignorance is Bliss says the Kevin we need to assure us that everything is under control, that all is well, is not Kevin Spacey but Kevin Bacon: