Under the legal process of discovery, Rapp was able to subpoena documents from Spacey. However, discovery is a two-way street. Rapp had to hand over the emails and texts exchanged between him and Vary preceding the publication of the article.
These emails and texts exposed journalist-interviewee collusion between Vary and Rapp. In Rapp’s original pre-publication interview, Rapp told Vary he had a visceral and traumatic reaction when he saw Spacey at the 2008 Tony Awards. It was a dramatic illustration of how Spacey’s alleged sexual abuse affected Rapp for decades.
But Vary had a problem. He did some basic research and quickly discovered it could not be confirmed that Spacey even attended the 2008 Tony Awards. This was a big problem: Vary was asking readers to believe Rapp could remember, in detail, an encounter with Spacey over 30 years ago in 1986, but now knew Rapp was substantially wrong about an event less than a decade ago.
To save the story, Vary decided to hide Rapp’s bad memory from Buzzfeed’s readers.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member