House Of Cards production delayed again

Filming of the sixth and final season of House of Cards will be delayed once again following the sexual assault revelations surrounding Kevin Spacey.

Production of the award-winning show, where Spacey previously had the lead role, has been pushed back another two weeks until December 8, The Hollywood reporter said.

Netflix already announced that the upcoming season would be the show’s last following the multiple accusations against Spacey, and he is expected to be written out of the final season.

At least 15 young men have come forward to say that he sexually assaulted or attempted to rape them. 

‘These last two months have tested and tried all of us in ways none of us could have foreseen,’ Pauline Micelli, Media Rights Capital senior vice president of television business and legal affairs, said in a letter to production crew and cast.

‘The one thing we have learned throughout this process is that this production is bigger than just one person, and we could not be more proud to be associated with one of the most loyal and talented production cast and crews in this business.’

Robin Wright, Spacey’s co-star in the show continues to maintains her silence on the sex abuse scandal.

Spacey and Robin Wright play the leads Francis and Claire Underwood on the hit show

Netflix removed Spacey from the cover photo of the show and instead replaced it with a photo of Wright by herself (pictured here)

Jessica Chastain vouched for Wright as she tweeted: ‘Can #RobinWright just be the lead of @HouseofCards now? We’re ready for it.’

Additionally, Netflix removed Spacey from the cover photo of the show and instead replaced it with a photo of Wright by herself.

The company announced at the beginning of November they wouldn’t make House Of Cards as long as Spacey was involved, and that it was dropping a biopic of writer Gore Vidal that he had been set to star in too.

BuzzFeed News also spoke to three more men who accused Spacey of inappropriate conduct – including one who said the actor invited him to watch gay porn and gave him cocktails when he was 16.

‘Netflix will not be involved with any further production of House of Cards that includes Kevin Spacey,’ the company said in a statement.

‘We will continue to work with [Media Rights Capital, the production house behind the show] during this hiatus time to evaluate our path forward as it relates to the show.’

‘We have also decided we will not be moving forward with the release of the film Gore, which was in post-production, starring and produced by Kevin Spacey.’

Jessica Chastain vouched for Wright as she tweeted the show should continue with Wright as the lead, despite Spacey being kicked off

The statement is vague about the fate of House of Cards, but Page Six reported that production would continue without Spacey’s involvement. It is unclear whether that is speculation; the claim isn’t attributed to any source.

The show began with production house Media Rights Capital (MRC), but Spacey has an executive producer credit on the show, and his own company – Trigger Street Productions – has been involved in the show over the first five seasons.

It’s not clear whether the first five seasons of the show will remain on Netflix. 

Robin Wright is pictured here on the red carpet with her daughter Dylan Penn

Spacey’s woes came after Star Trek: Discovery actor Anthony Rapp claimed that Spacey had come onto him when he was just 14 years old, after a party at Spacey’s, when they were the only ones in the apartment.

He said the actor had drunkenly picked him up ‘like a bride,’ and then lay down on top of him. Spacey said the story ‘horrified’ him and said he didn’t recall the encounter, but said he apologized ‘if I did behave then as he describes.’

Since then, a claim has emerged that Spacey made a ‘gesture and remark’ on the set of the first season in 2012 that resulted in him undergoing a ‘training process’.

Star Trek: Discovery actor Anthony Rapp was the first to make claims against Spacey, saying the actor drunkenly grabbed him and lay on top of him when he was just 14

And on Friday another three claims were fired at the Oscar-winner – one of them again involving a teenager, another one claiming that he grabbed a man’s penis and chased him around a club, and the third saying he got an assistant to request sex on set.

Spacey’s lawyer did not respond to BuzzFeed’s request for comment on the new claims. 

Justin Dawes told Buzzfeed that he was working as a 16-year-old volunteer theater usher in 1988 when he met Spacey, then 29, after a play he was appearing in.

The actor invited him and a male friend over to watch Roman Polanski’s Chinatown at an apartment he was renting for the duration of the performance.

This was some 11 years after Polanski himself was infamously  charged with getting a 13-year-old girl drunk and raping her.

Dawes said that he and his friend arrived at Spacey’s home to find no-one else there, and the TV playing gay pornography. Spacey mixed them cocktails, he said.

‘We all had a drink, and we were kind of like, “Oh, no one else is coming?” And he’s like, “Oh, no one else decided to come,” and he never mentioned that this porn was playing,’ Dawes told BuzzFeed News. ‘It was really awkward.’

Spacey (seen in 1986) allegedly approached a 16-year-old in 1988 and invited him to watch a movie. When the teen got to Spacey’s home, he said, gay porn was on the TV and Spacey was making cocktails. But the now-38-year-old said Spacey was ‘cringey’ and ‘benign’

He said it was ‘cringey’ and ‘benign’ but that it was obvious he was not an adult at the time: ”He knew that I was in high school. It was pretty clear. It’s not like I was pretending to be an older, cooler person.’

Friends of Dawes, who is straight, confirmed that he had told them about the story around that time, but the friend allegedly at the party couldn’t be contacted.

Friday’s second accuser was an unnamed journalist who said that Spacey grabbed his crotch during an interview in London in 2009.

Spacey, who was then head of London’s famous Old Vic theater, was starring in Inherit the Wind there when the journalist met him.

He said that Spacey was ‘charming’ during the interview, but grew lecherous after he invited the journalist out to a nighclub.

‘He just kept reaching between my legs and, you know, just grabbing my d**k,’ he said. 

‘I would move his hand away, and say something that I thought was pretending was funny or whatever at first. And then I was starting to get annoyed by it, and that was pretty clear.’

He says he repeatedly tried to move away from Spacey and shoo him off, but that Spacey kept following him, touching his legs.

Even saying he was in a committed relationship with a woman didn’t put off Spacey, he said: ‘He had somehow convinced himself that this was a sexual liaison that we both wanted.’ 

In 2009, during this production of Inherit the Wind in London, Spacey allegedly grabbed a journalist’s penis and chased him around a club

The journalist said that Spacey’s entourage did nothing to help, and that he felt compelled to stay because he was on an assignment. 

‘I was trying not to make a big scene, because I had an assignment to write about him,’ he said. ‘So it wasn’t clear to me that I should just, like, knock his teeth out, or something. I was in a weird dynamic of I wanted to be able to do my story.’

He said he ended up not printing the story because Spacey was in the closet, and he didn’t want to out him without the man’s permission.

Military advisor Mark Ebenhoch (pictured) said that on the set of Outbreak, one of Spacey’s ‘harem’ of assistants asked him to go to Spacey’s trailer and have sex with him

‘It has occurred to me since then that there’s this weird way that Spacey had discovered that the closet would shield other things,’ the journalist said. 

‘Being closeted has for him enabled him to use this privacy claim as a shield against anybody looking closely at his actual behavior.

‘And then it may have served as this strange, protective mechanism, to say, “My whole sexual life is off limits because of my sexuality.”‘ 

Spacey came out in his response to Rapp’s allegations – which empowered the journalist to speak out, but also led to a backlash from people who felt he was trying to distract from the claims against him while also selling out the LGBT community.

The third claim came from Mark Ebenhoch, who met Spacey on the set of 1995 thriller Outbreak, when he was 35 and Spacey around 36.

Ebenhoch, who is gay but was in the closed at the time, was working as a military consultant on the film, in which Spacey plays an Army virologist. 

He said that Spacey had a ‘harem’ of young male assistants according to those on set, and one day, ‘out of the complete blue’, one of them propositioned him on Spacey’s behalf.

Ebenhoch said there was no veiled invitation or euphemism involved: ‘They asked flat out to engage in a sexual act. It was enough to stun me. It blew me away.’

Warner Bros, the film’s distributor, declined to comment when approached by BuzzFeed News.

Ebenhoch said he avoided Spacey for the rest of the shoot, fearing what might happen if he was outed. ‘As a military adviser the last thing you’d want anyone to know is that you were gay,’ he said. 

On Thursday, MRC said it ‘will continue to thoroughly investigate all current claims and any new claims that are formally brought to our attention, and will continue to monitor our own production and practices to ensure that our cast and crew feel safe and supported.’