Kevin Spacey gives first public performance since assault claims

Kevin Spacey. Photo / Getty Images

For months he has kept out of the public eye, his former star status languishing under a cloud of notoriety following allegations of sexual assault.

But on Friday Kevin Spacey broke cover, and in some style, to take part in a very pointed poetry reading about a wounded performer determined not to succumb to the blows he endures.

Spacey appeared in front of the Greek statue Boxer at Rest in Rome, to read Gabriele Tinti's poem The Boxer, about an exhausted fighter used for entertainment, then left bleeding by the ringside.

The poem 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".

Standing beside the Greek bronze cast of the ravaged fighter, which dates from around 316BC, Spacey intoned the poem to a startled audience at the Palazzo Massimo alle Terme.

This was the first time Spacey has performed in public since sexual misconduct charges from 2017 were dropped by a Massachusetts prosecutor, after William Little declined to testify against him at a pretrial hearing.

Little had accused the actor of groping him at the Club Car bar and restaurant in Nantucket in 2016. Spacey denied the claims, but is still being investigated by Scotland Yard over six allegations of sexual assault in the UK between 1996 and 2013.

The Sunday Telegraph