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—a 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.
It’s like this (via Variety): MRC has been trying, for basically eight years at this point, to find someone it can sue or charge for the many millions of dollars it lost when it was forced to rewrite, re-shoot, and basically re-everything the Netflix political drama’s final season, after allegations of sexual assault were made against Spacey in 2017. At first, the studio went, somewhat successfully, 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’d violated the studio’s sexual harassment policy. The issue being that, as far as anyone can tell, Kevin Spacey doesn’t have $30 million, which means MRC had a moral victory and not much else, which isn’t usually how mid-tier movie and TV studios like to swing it.
And so the studio’s 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’t 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’d have to get his medical records—which is why, in 2024, MRC cut Spacey a deal. He’d get $29 million knocked off his bill, and MRC would get his medical records… along with a tacit assumption that, when its trial against Fireman’s 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‘ final season.
That is not what ended up happening, though. Spacey took the stand at the trial, but clearly on the side of the defendants: He stated on multiple occasions that despite entering rehab, he “personally disputed” the sex addiction diagnosis, and told the show’s producers that he was “available, willing, and able to provide all of the services” he was contracted for on the show. (He also had a lot of back-and-forths with MRC’s lawyer over the numerous allegations against him, which he continues to deny.) MRC made a dogged effort to suggest that Spacey himself wasn’t the prevailing expert on his own capabilities, bringing in a psychological expert who testified that Spacey had been suicidal at the time of his departure from House Of Cards, and unable to work. But it doesn’t appear to have convinced anybody: On Tuesday, a jury found that Spacey’s sex addiction wasn’t the reason he departed the series, which means Fireman’s Fund wasn’t liable to pay the bill, which is now sitting back in MRC’s lap.
It has been a busy, if mostly successful, legal month for Spacey: Last week, he managed to settle out of court with three men who’d accused him of sexual assault in the U.K.