Kevin Spacey, an Oscar winner is forced to pay $31 million to the producer of House of Cards, See why
Touchaheart Nigeria reports that according to a court file released Monday, Oscar-winning actor Kevin Spacey was ordered last year to pay roughly $31 million to the studio behind Netflix’s “House of Cards” for breaching his contract by violating the company’s sexual harassment policy.
The arbitration took conducted behind closed doors last year, but it was only revealed this week after the production company MRC filed a petition with the Los Angeles Superior Court demanding confirmation that the money will be delivered. According to MRC’s recently filed motion, the arbitrator deemed “the claims against Spacey to be genuine” during an eight-day hearing in February 2020.
The paper also indicated that the arbitrator found Spacey’s contract violations to be “egregious.”
M. Profitt Productions and Trigger Street Productions, the two-time Academy Award winner’s firms, were ordered to pay $29.5 million in damages, $1.2 million in attorneys’ fees, and $235,000 in arbitration expenses. “MRC stood its ground, pursued this case doggedly, and obtained the right result in the end,” said the studio’s lawyer, Michael Kump, founding partner of the Santa Monica-based firm Kinsella Weitzman Iser Kump Holley.
MRC is an independent studio that has worked on Netflix’s “Ozarks,” Hulu’s “The Great” and Apple TV+’s “The Shrink Next Door.”
MRC severed ties to Spacey, who starred on “House of Cards,”
The studio then scrapped the sixth and final season of the popular streaming show in 2017, before rewriting it without his character, President Frank Underwood, and reducing its episode number from 13 to eight.
MRC later filed an arbitration action against Spacey for breach of contract, claiming he had cost the production tens of millions of dollars with his behavior. Those arbitration proceedings were conducted out of the public eye.
“The safety of our employees, sets and work environments is of paramount importance to MRC and why we set out to push for accountability,” MRC said in a statement Monday.
The case was decided in MRC’s favor by an arbitrator in October 2020. The arbitrator in their decision found that Spacey had repeatedly breached his contractual obligations by “certain conduct in connection with several crew members in each of the five seasons that he starred in and executive produced” the show.
Spacey later appealed the arbitrator’s ruling, but it was denied this month.
