Nantucket judge: Kevin Spacey trial unlikely before fall

NANTUCKET — Despite his lawyer’s push for a summer court date, actor Kevin Spacey will likely not go on trial on a charge of indecent assault and battery before late October or early November, a Nantucket District Court judge said Thursday.

Spacey, 59, is charged with groping an 18-year-old busboy at the Club Car, an island restaurant and bar, in July 2016.

Spacey, who also goes by his real name of Kevin Fowler in court documents, did not appear at the pretrial hearing with his Los Angeles-based attorney, Alan Jackson.

Judge Thomas Barrett heard arguments from Jackson, Cape and Islands Assistant District Attorney Michael Giardino and Mitchell Garabedian, an attorney for the teen and his mother, on whether he should grant motions to give the defense access to the teen’s cellphone, have the Club Car produce employment and credit card records from the night of the alleged incident to help track down potential witnesses and compel Garabedian to provide his retainer agreement.

The judge took no action on the motions other than to order the Club Car to produce surveillance footage from the night in question, if it exists. He set another pretrial date of June 3.

Jackson asked Barrett to set the trial for mid-July, or August if that would not work, but the judge said island trials are held every other month and Spacey’s case would be queued up behind other cases on the docket.

“We have limited trial time,” Barrett said. “The best we can hope for will probably be the fall.”

Jackson asked the judge to make the teen turn over his cellphone for a forensic examination or to make Giardino share the “data dump” already completed by prosecution investigators.

Giardino said he was going to give Jackson the information he deemed relevant to the case, a process he said would take six weeks to two months.

Barrett said he would wait until Giardino completed that process to rule on the motion.

Jackson said Giardino handed him an estimated 45 to 50 printed pages of text messages sent to and from the teen, as recovered from his cellphone. In paper form, he cannot tell if or when a text was deleted or recovered or anything else about the metadata, he said.

He said eight pages of the text messages made it clear that the messages the teen gave to the police had been edited before being turned over.

“That’s integral to this case,” he said. “I need the raw data, not a printed version of what Giardino deems relevant.”

Garabedian said he opposed turning over the phone in its entirety to Jackson because it could contain privileged or protected information. Jackson countered that the teen waived any rights when he voluntarily handed the cellphone to police.

Garabedian is known for representing victims in the Catholic priest sexual abuse scandal and was portrayed in the movie “Spotlight.”

Garabedian said the teen’s mother, former Boston TV news anchor Heather Unruh, signed the waiver giving police access to the phone but he wasn’t sure what, if any, complications that would pose for the case.

In arguing for access to documents Garabedian sent to police and prosecutors as part of his own investigation into the matter, Jackson said he wanted them to bolster his argument that the teen and Unruh filed the charges in a larger attempt to sue Spacey and “line their pockets.” No civil lawsuit has been filed.

According to police reports filed after a magistrate’s hearing, the teen told investigators that Spacey bought him a series of drinks after they were introduced at the Club Car and during the course of the evening made suggestive comments, repeatedly invited him back to his house and unzipped the teen’s pants and rubbed his penis over his underwear as they stood in a crowded area near the bar’s piano.

Spacey has been accused of sexual misconduct by more than a dozen men — some of them teens at the time of the alleged incidents — but the Nantucket case is the first to result in criminal charges.