NANTUCKET, MA — The man accusing Kevin Spacey of groping him at a Nantucket bar in 2016 spoke publicly for the first time Monday, testifying that he did not delete any texts from the night of the encounter before invoking the Fifth Amendment, which struck his previous testimony from the record. During a tense hearing, a judge said the case against Spacey could eventually be dismissed. The hearing also included heated testimony from the accuser’s father and questions over whether his mother was watching it on TV when she was supposed to be sequestered.
Spacey was charged with felony indecent assault and battery after former Boston news anchor Heather Unruh publicly accused him of groping her son in 2017.
At the center of Monday’s hearing was a cellphone that the 21-year-old accuser and his family have been unable to find, according to their attorney, Mitchell Garabedian. The actor himself was not required to appear in court and did not attend.
Spacey’s attorneys were granted access to the accuser’s phone after they argued exculpatory text messages were deleted. The defense said texts between the man and his girlfriend at the time show the man “continued to accept drinks” from Spacey after “boasting” that the actor had touched him.
Garabedian told the court a backup was recovered from July-December 2016, which includes one of two videos sought by the defense. Spacey is accused of groping the then-18-year-old at the Club Car restaurant in July 2016.
Garabedian said his client and his family do not recall getting the phone back from evidence, while a second phone used at the time was stolen in Europe. Prosecutors said the Massachusetts State Police gave the phone back to the accuser or his father in December 2017, but there was no receipt of its return.
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Spacey’s attorney, Alan Jackson, slammed the court for not keeping a better record of transactions involving a piece of evidence. He said his team is “entitled” to the phone.
“That’s what we want,” Jackson said. “That’s what we’re entitled to.”
Massachusetts State Police Trooper Gerald Donovan testified that Unruh gave him the phone on November 29, 2017 and told him she had deleted some “frat boy activities.” Donovan said he did not tell Unruh or her son not to delete anything, nor did he ask why she deleted the purported “frat boy activities” from the phone.
Donovan told the court he believes there are “deletions within the texts” from the night of the accuser’s encounter with Spacey. When Jackson asked whether the deleted items go “beyond ‘frat boy activities,'” Donovan replied, “Yes.”
However, Donovan elaborated that he could see deleted items and did not feel any were exculpatory to Spacey’s case. He said he believed he gave the phone to the accuser’s father but was “remiss” in not having him sign for it.
Spacey’s accuser took the stand after Donovan. Patch is not identifying the accuser because the case involves a sexual abuse charge. The accuser said he was texting with his then-girlfriend in one chat and with seven male friends in a separate group chat that night.
The accuser said he communicated with his mother “more than five times” about the encounter with Spacey in the 15 months before he made the complaint. He said he does not recall how many times his mother saw his phone before he went to the police, nor does he recall speaking with her about deleting texts.
“Theoretically, she might have,” he added, but told the court if she did, he would have deleted them on his own. However he maintained he did not delete any messages, stating that he tried to go back and find the rest of a conversation that was missing in one of the screenshots he sent to police.
The conversations are not there “due to a variety of circumstances,” the accuser said.
The intensity of the hearing escalated when the accuser’s father took the stand. He took exception to some of Jackson’s questions and at one point the judge threatened to hold the accuser’s father in contempt if he didn’t compose himself. He told the court he and his wife looked at his son’s phone together and could not recall if he ever got it back from police.
Unruh testified that she did not delete any text messages and did not instruct her son to either. She said she accessed the phone prior to turning it over to police to look for a video purportedly showing Spacey groping her son.
Unruh admitted to deleting “a few things” from her son’s phone, including lyrics she said someone wrote on transfers to her son’s Venmo account that could have been construed as racist. She later told prosecutors she deleted evidence of marijuana use.
Unruh claimed she was “very honest with police” about what was on her son’s phone and did not delete anything pertaining to the case.
Jackson asked Unruh about racially charged language and evidence of drug use on her son’s phone. She said his friends sometimes used racially offensive language, but he never did. When asked if she deleted homophobic language from her son’s phone, Unruh said her son grew up with “gay men as mentors and is not a bigot.”
Jackson showed Unruh photos of her then-underage son drinking, which she said “doesn’t make him a criminal.”
Unruh said she deleted “just a couple of things that concerned me” from her son’s phone. Jackson called Unruh the “gatekeeper” of evidence and said she does not get to decide what’s deleted and what stays.
Unruh emphasized the allegations against Spacey are “not untrue,” to which Jackson answered, “We’ll see.”
Spacey’s accuser dropped a civil lawsuit against the actor last week, eight days after filing it in Nantucket Superior Court. Garabedian said the suit was voluntarily dismissed due to the “emotional toll” the case has taken on the accuser. Unruh testified Monday that there was no settlement in the civil case.
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