this post was submitted on 16 Jul 2025
781 points (98.4% liked)
Not The Onion
17243 readers
650 users here now
Welcome
We're not The Onion! Not affiliated with them in any way! Not operated by them in any way! All the news here is real!
The Rules
Posts must be:
- Links to news stories from...
- ...credible sources, with...
- ...their original headlines, that...
- ...would make people who see the headline think, “That has got to be a story from The Onion, America’s Finest News Source.”
Please also avoid duplicates.
Comments and post content must abide by the server rules for Lemmy.world and generally abstain from trollish, bigoted, or otherwise disruptive behavior that makes this community less fun for everyone.
And that’s basically it!
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
It depends on what your charges are (and I know someone will only read one sentence of this and down vote me but please hear me out.) Is he a criminal? No. Not after the shit show that was his trial. His accusers were caught flat out lying so hard I doubt there is a judge in this world who would've found Spacey guilty. The guy was totally cancelled, no friends with the back against a wall but walked out free because the accusers couldn't come up with a story that didn't contradict basic, easily verifiable facts like dates for example.
Is he a huge, narcissistic slug with a short temper that abused his status to do unethical things? Yeah, I think so. I guess that was the reason he had no allies in any of this. His "friends" probably never really liked the guy and didn't think he was worth risking their entire careers for even if they believed him.
Why am I saying all this? Because it serves as yet another example where the court of the public was way too overkill because of some hearsay. The mob is more invested in their own individual feelings than the facts. "It feels highly likely he’s guilty" really hammers home what went wrong here.
Someone doesn't have to actually do crimes to be a bad person. I haven't watched Spacey movies since all of this just like I haven't watched Cruise movies ever since I first heard about Scientology. Seeing their faces gives me the ick and I don't think these guys deserve my support but that doesn't mean I think they're rapists.
That being said we both know why he probably asks for the release of the files. It doesn't matter if he's guilty when everyone thinks he is so this little PR stunt is a desperate attempt to be on the right side of something and make himself look less guilty no matter if the files are released or not. I have little pity for him but we can do better.
I generally agree with everything you said.
But it's also possible he just wants them released for the correct reason too, PR or not. I don't really understand why the leap is always to something cynical like that as a matter of course. Even if you don't like these people, they are still people