According to the Nantucket District Court Clerk’s Office in Massachusetts, a civil lawsuit against the Oscar-winning actor, Kevin Spacey, was dropped due to “the unavailability of the complaining witness.” The case against Spacey was regarding alleged sexual assault. 

In December 2018, Spacey was charged with indecent assault and battery by former Boston TV news anchor Heather Unruh, who claimed that her then-18-year-old son was sexually assaulted by Spacey at the Club Car Restaurant in 2016. Spacey pleaded not guilty to this allegation. 

The defense was given files by the plaintiff’s cell phone, but there was not much information to go off of. The defense claimed that the text messages from the night of the incident were deleted from the phone. They believed that the messages could have proven Spacey innocent.

“He and or his mother deleted the exculpatory texts that were on the phone. They deleted information that they didn’t want the police to have, they deleted information they didn’t want us to have,” said Alan Jackson, Spacey’s lawyer. 

The judge then required for the plaintiff’s actual cell phone that he used during the night of the alleged incident. However, the mother and son said that they could not locate the phone. The judge wanted the phone found and turned into court at the pretrial hearing on July 8.

On July 8, the son and his parents admitted to deleting text messages from the cell phone used that night before handing over their phone to the police back in 2017. When the defense warned the plaintiff that deleting the “evidence” was a chargeable felony, the accused pleaded the Fifth. 

Mitchell Garabedian, the plaintiff’s attorney, said that the parents allegedly had not seen the phone since the time it was handed over to the police in 2017. The officials claimed that the phone was handed back to the accused’s father, but he does not remember having it returned to him. 

Thus the charges were dropped. 

“My client and his family have shown an enormous amount of courage under difficult circumstances. I have no further comment at this time,” said Garabedian. 

Spacey is still under other investigations for alleged sexual assaults.