Kevin Spacey: Channel 4 Used Journalist Who Faked Story About Spacey In Their Recent Documentary
Private text messages revealed Buzzfeed's Adam Vary secretly changed key details of allegations when he realized they might not be true. Readers had no idea.
Kevin Spacey is back in the news after the UK’s Channel 4 and MAX in the US aired a documentary with new allegations of sexual assault. Before “Spacey Unmasked,” the actor had been accused by multiple men of assault.
However when the cases went to court, they either collapsed before trial or juries have found him innocent. And this has happened again and again. So far, Spacey has been cleared by three courts on two continents as the accusers were unmasked as liars, money grabbers, fantasists, or a combination of the above.
But maybe this new documentary, a co-production between Channel 4 and Roast Beef Productions is different? This however is very, very unlikely when you look at who the producers use to bolster the latest allegations. Adam Vary, the former Buzzfeed News journalist who wrote the first story accusing Spacey of sexual assault, is brought in to the documentary as a voice of context and credibility.
But our investigations, and court documents and private test messages made public through discovery reveal the original allegations against Spacey contained several falsehoods, and that Adam Vary was aware of them when he published the article. They have also revealed that the journalist colluded with actor Anthony Rapp, the original complainant, to cover up and change details of the allegations when he discovered serious holes in the story.
You can hear the whole story in our podcast The Kevin Spacey Trial: Unfiltered, available here or wherever you get your podcasts.
Spacey & Tony
Allegations against Spacey first emerged in a Buzzfeed News article published in October 2017. Written by Vary it effectively ended Spacey's career and public life.
The Buzzfeed article claimed Kevin Spacey sexually assaulted actor Anthony Rapp when Rapp was just 14. All the complainants in the UK criminal case said they were inspired to come forward by the original Buzzfeed piece. Rapp alleged that at a party in 1986 was he was 14 and Spacey was 26, Spacey waited until all the other guests had left, picked Rapp up and laid him on the bed, and then laid on top of him trying to sexually assault him. Rapp said he managed to escape before anything else happened, but that the incident had scarred him for life.
Rapp grew up in the theater. He landed his first major Broadway role when he was 14, which is how he met Kevin Spacey. Spacey was also performing in his first breakout part in Long Day’s Journey Into Night. It’s fair to say that their career paths have diverged. Spacey became hailed as one of the greatest actors of his generation and one of the most recognizable people on the planet. Rapp is best known for playing Mark Cohen in the original cast of Rent, and reprising his role in the movie. Since 2017 he has played Commander Paul Stamets on the show Star Trek: Discovery.
At first glance, the Buzzfeed article looked damning. The allegations and a panicked response by Spacey ended his career. However, a closer look at the article showed it was unusual in that it had the appearance of being detailed and carefully researched but it was rather sparse and vague about the very important details.
The article said the assault occurred in 1986 but didn’t give a date, not even a month or season. It also didn’t give an address or even an area of New York where the attack allegedly occurred. Similarly there was a mention of Rapp meeting Spacey along with Rapp’s “17-year -old friend” but the friend is not named or interviewed to corroborate Rapp’s allegations.
It turns out these strange omissions were not accidental but rather the result of unethical collusion between a journalist and an angry interviewee to bring down a celebrity. Facts Vary discovered that contradicted Rapp’s allegations were deliberately buried or changed by the journalist and other details of the story were kept deliberately vague to prevent Spacey from finding evidence that would let him “flatly deny” the allegations.
Narrative Collusion
This story that brought down Kevin Spacey would have gone unquestioned except that Anthony Rapp sued Spacey for $40 million for emotional trauma in 2020.
Under the legal process of discovery, Rapp was able to subpoena documents from Spacey. However, discovery is a two-way street. Rapp had to hand over the emails and texts exchanged between him and Buzzfeed reporter Adam Vary preceding the publication of the article.
These emails and texts exposed extraordinary and highly unethical journalist-interviewee collusion between Vary and Rapp. As Vary interviewed Rapp for the story and did some basic research - it very quickly became clear that there were major problems with the allegations. Some of Rapp’s claims were untrue and could not have happened. Vary was also concerned that Spacey could produce evidence disproving key details of Rapp’s allegations and there was also an eyewitness who could make or break the story.
There was a lot at stake for everyone involved as Rapp’s story started to disintegrate pre-publication. It landed with Vary and Buzzfeed at a very particular time when both were under enormous pressures to get better stories and gain more clicks.
In October 2017, Adam Vary was a relatively unknown journalist working for Buzzfeed, a struggling outlet that had once burned brightly but was now in financial distress. Buzzfeed’s management also believed their journalism was not as sharp as it had been. They were missing stories. They were sore they had not broken the Weinstein #MeToo story. Executives were panicking and firing people who they blamed for the malaise. Vary’s close colleagues were among the worst hit. Three senior entertainment editors were fired from Vary’s small department, and in a memo the company’s clear why: Buzzfeed had not been landing the big #MeToo scoops.
The memo said, “The holes in our Weinstein coverage made clear that we needed to change the way we cover entertainment to put ourselves in a position to tell great stories. …… I firmly believe that BuzzFeed News should be leading that coverage.”
The memo added that Buzzfeed would now be “focused specifically on entertainment news and harvesting scoops on the biggest stories of the day coming out of film, tv, music, and pop culture.”
The message was clear. Get More Scoops. Especially #MeToo scoops. Or Buzzfeed and your job will be on the line.
It was in this atmosphere that Vary started to see the Spacey story, the biggest story of his career and the biggest story Buzzfeed was to have in years, melt away under the spotlight of routine fact checking.
Vary’s solution was not to spike the story but to change the the details of the allegations to meet the facts and deliberately keep the details of other allegations so vague Kevin Spacey could have no way of proving his innocence.
The problems started to emerge when Vary went looking for a photo to back up an important part of Rapp’s story. Rapp told him in a pre-publication interview that he’d had a visceral and traumatic reaction when he saw Spacey at the 2008 Tony Awards. This incident was a dramatic illustration of how Spacey's alleged 1986 assault affected Rapp for decades.
But Vary had a problem. He did some basic research and very quickly discovered that Kevin Spacey had not attended the 2008 Tony Awards. This threatened to undermine Rapp’s credibility. Vary was asking readers to believe that Rapp could remember, in detail, an encounter with Spacey over 30 years ago in 1986, but Vary now knew that Rapp was substantially wrong about an event less than a decade ago.
To save the story, Vary decided to hide Rapp’s bad memory from Buzzfeed's readers. He would coverup Rapp’s errors to make him appear as an unimpeachable victim and witness.
The coverup emerged when Spacey’s defense team got access to some of Rapp’s text messages in discovery. This is the text message Vary sent to Rapp, detailing his plan:
“One thing to make you aware of: We can’t seem to place Spacey at the Tony’s in 2008. He didn’t present and wasn’t nominated, and there’s no photos we can find. We don’t doubt he was there, but we don’t want to nail down a specific date that Spacey could then just flatly deny. We’re still looking, but if we can’t nail it down, we’ll likely say that you saw him at an industry event or some such.”
Rather than scrapping the story because of Rapp's unreliable memory or letting Buzzfeed readers know of this unreliability, Vary decided to change Rapp’s story to make it fit “the facts.” In the end, they claimed the encounter happened at the 1999 Tony Awards – when they could prove both Spacey and Rapp attended.
Avoiding The Details
This wasn’t the end of Adam Vary's and Buzzfeed’s unethical and deceptive journalism. The rest of the text showed Vary was worried Spacey could somehow prove he didn't host a party, or wasn't even in the country in 1986 when the assault allegedly happened. Actors frequently travel for work.
To prevent this, Vary boasted to Rapp about a sneaky solution: He would make the date and location of the party and the assault so vague Spacey would not be able to produce solid evidence to refute the allegations.
“(Similarly, [to the Tonys solution] we’re also going to steer away from exact specificity in the story for the party.),” he told Rapp in a text.
That's exactly what they did. In the article, the assault is described as happening sometime “in 1986” with no description or address of the apartment.
This wasn’t the only piece of strange journalistic vagueness in the Buzzfeed story. Vary wrote that Spacey took Rapp and “a 17-year-old” to a nightclub a few days before the alleged assault -- the implication being that Spacey was prone to inappropriate behavior with minors.
Except this fact was wrong and easily checkable. That “17-year-old” was John Barrowman, now a well known actor and a friend from Anthony Rapps's hometown. Barrowman was actually a 19-year-old adult at the time they went to the nightclub and was Anthony Rapps's chaperone for the night. They did go to a nightclub, but it was early on a Sunday evening after a matinee performance of Spacey’s play.
In a strange omission Vary did not name Barrowman -- now a famous actor -- in the Buzzfeed article. Perhaps it was because if he had, Vary would have had to give Barrowman’s real age. Rapp would probably have known what it was - they went to the same school after all. Or Adam Vary could have done a quick Google search to confirm that Barrowman was 19 at this time. His age is right at the top of his Wikipedia entry. But that would have destroyed the narrative that Kevin Spacey had taken two minors to a nightclub so Vary lied about Barrowman’s age and didn’t identify him so that Spacey could challenge the allegations.
Vary also didn’t reach out to Barrowman to ask about his memories of the night and what he saw of Spacey’s interactions with Anthony Rapp. A strange omission. But Spacey’s lawyers did, and it revealed a totally different story. In short Barrowman’s account of their interactions contradicted Rapp’s in almost every detail.
In a sworn deposition, Barrowman said they all went back to Spacey’s apartment after the nightclub and the apartment was a studio. Barrowman said there was no party, as Rapp claimed and, as it was a studio, there was no separate bedroom where Rapp claimed the alleged assault took place. All this cast serious doubts about whether the party ever existed or the assault could have actually happened as Rapp described. This information - fatal to Rapp’s allegations was just a phone call away for Adam Vary. But if he had made that call the biggest story of his career would never have appeared and a failing Buzzfeed would not have had a story that gained record clicks and put the outlet back in the world’s headlines.
Evading the Questions
After the Spacey “scoop” Adam Vary was very talkative and gave a number of interviews about his journalism and how he managed to get the story. However when asked to explain it under oath in a deposition with Spacey’s lawyers, Vary was less talkative and claimed “reporter’s privilege”. He refused to answer close to 100 questions. The taped recording of his responses show his refusals become almost become comical at times. He wouldn't even say if he had used Google to check John Barrowman's age. American jurisprudence has put in place much-needed protections to allow journalists to maintain confidential sources and protect news gathering– but it's doubtful if judges thought the scope of these privileges should extend to refusing to answer questions about if you had ever used Google in your research.
In the podcast we produced about the case, there’s a montage of Vary refusing to answer simple questions from Spacey’s lawyers. You can hear it below:
You can listen to the full episode here.
Eventually, Spacey's lawyers took Vary to court where, after reading the messages between Rapp and Vary, federal Judge Lewis Kaplan was scathing about Vary’s journalistic ethics.
“What calls Vary's independence into question is the messages to Rapp and other documents indicating Vary's willingness to shape the story to Rapp's objectives, to overlook or massage unverified details, or to directly advise Rapp on public relations strategy. These statements go far beyond a ‘point of view’ about the subject matter. In some instances, they come close to painting Vary as a commissioned agent,” he wrote in a pre-trial judgment.
Vary has never answered questions about his “willingness to shape the story to Rapp's objectives, to overlook or massage unverified details,” despite being ordered to do so by the judge.
But when Adam Rapp’s case went to court the jury didn't take long to make up their mind about the Buzzfeed story. After a two-week civil trial, it only took about an hour to dismiss the case and exonerate Spacey.
Perhaps the latest Spacey allegations are different. Maybe they are true. We don’t know. But we do know he has been completely exonerated every time previous allegations have been tested in open court on two continents.
And we definitely know that Buzzfeed deceived its readers and that Vary’s journalism was deeply unethical designed to falsify details and mislead Buzzfeed readers . And we also know that Channel 4 thought Adam Vary was a credible journalist who would add credibility to their show. But its clear now that – if at the time - the original allegations were properly researched and ethically reported – they would have never have been published in any reputable news outlet.
To this day the original Buzzfeed article still remains unchanged. There is no acknowledgment of the collusion to obscure and withhold important details. And it still erroneously refers to Barrowman as Vary’s "a 17-year-old friend."
We sent Vary, who went on to a senior job at Variety, and Buzzfeed, which later closed its news division, a series of questions about the contents of the communications between Rapp and Vary and the errors in the Kevin Spacey article.
They both declined to comment.
Channel 4 gave Spacey seven days to answer the latest allegations, some of which dated back almost 50 years. Spacey complained that the producers had refused to “provide me with sufficient details to investigate the matters” which he described as “anonymized and non-specific allegations”.
These were not the typical objections of a celebrity under pressure. They came from the knowledge that sometimes journalists make stories vague to stop people such as Spacey refuting damaging claims. Given that Channel 4 was using Adam Vary in Spacey Unmasked, he has a particular reason to be concerned about “vague allegations.”
We outlined Vary’s troubling journalism in our podcast The Kevin Spacey Trial: Unfiltered and in other outlets.
Channel 4 either did not know about Vary’s troubling journalism around Spacey or they did, but didn’t care. Either way it shows a sloppiness and a disregard for the truth that leaves their documentary with a lot more questions than answers.
You can listen to Kevin Spacey Trial: Unfiltered here or wherever you get your podcasts.
 | A guest post by
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 | A guest post by
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I'm so sick of the dishonesty that pervades everything these days.