Despite some obvious and juicy contenders, few recent TV medical insurance trials have been weirder, or more convoluted, than the one surrounding House Of Cards, Kevin Spacey, and the studio that used to make\/employ them, MRC\u2014a trial that finally wrapped up earlier this week, with MRC a loser, its insurance company off the hook, and Spacey himself having seemingly managed to screw over his old bosses to the tune of nearly $30 million.\u00a0<\/p>\n
It\u2019s like this (via Variety<\/a>): MRC has been trying, for basically eight years at this point, to find someone\u00a0it can sue or charge for the many millions of dollars it lost when it was forced to rewrite, re-shoot, and basically re-everything<\/a> the Netflix political drama\u2019s final season, after allegations of sexual assault were made against Spacey in 2017. At first, the studio went, somewhat successfully<\/a>, after Spacey himself, hitting him with a breach of contract accusation in 2021 that saw an arbitrator find him liable for roughly $30 million, on the grounds that he\u2019d violated the studio\u2019s sexual harassment policy. The issue being that, as far as anyone can tell, Kevin Spacey doesn\u2019t have\u00a0$30 million, which means MRC had a moral victory and not much else, which isn\u2019t usually how mid-tier movie and TV studios like to swing it.<\/p>\n And so the studio\u2019s lawyers decided to put all their eggs in a somewhat oddly shaped basket: What if they could get their insurance to pay, instead? After all, Spacey had checked himself into rehab, and reportedly been diagnosed with sex addiction, in the weeks after the accusations went wide; wasn\u2019t a debilitating medical problem that stopped their lead star from working exactly what all those premiums were supposed to be covering? Of course, to prove Spacey was medically unfit to work, they\u2019d have to get his medical records\u2014which is why, in 2024<\/a>, MRC cut Spacey a deal. He\u2019d get $29 million knocked off his bill, and MRC would get his medical records\u2026 along with a tacit assumption that, when its trial against Fireman\u2019s Fund insurance came around, Spacey might back up the basic case that his sex addiction, and not a tidal wave of headlines in which multiple young men accused him of sexual harassment and assault, were what led him to depart Cards\u2018 final season.<\/p>\n