Kevin Spacey is emerging from London’s Southwark Crown Court after a month-long trial, now cleared of sexual misconduct by courts on both sides of the Atlantic. Will Hollywood welcome back the two-time Oscar-winner — one of the highest-profile scalps claimed by the #MeToo movement — or let stand his conviction in the court of public opinion?

Mr. Spacey’s predicament mirrors that of President Reagan’s labor secretary, Raymond Donovan, in 1987. The first sitting cabinet secretary to be indicted, he resigned, but years later was found not guilty on charges of larceny and fraud, whereupon he asked, “Which office do I go to to get my reputation back?”

Among the many accusations in America and Britain that sank Mr. Spacey’s reputation and caused his “cancellation,” those in the London case date to 2004 and 2013, when he was artistic director at London’s Old Vic theater. Facing criminal charges, he pleaded not guilty on all nine counts — seven of sexual assault, one of indecent assault, and one of “causing a person to engage in penetrative sexual activity without consent.”

At the trial’s outset, Mr. Spacey faced four additional charges, but Judge Mark Wall removed them, ruling that they duplicated others under an older statute.

“One of the cardinal rules of the so-called MeToo movement,” Mr. Spacey’s lawyer, Jennifer Keller, said in her opening arguments for the actor’s civil lawsuit trial in Manhattan last year, is “you have to believe the victim.” 

Yet Ms. Keller contended that the allegations were “cleverly set up” by a fellow actor, Anthony Rapp, who claimed her client had assaulted him in 1986.

“As Mr. Spacey’s star rose,” Ms. Keller told the jury, “Mr. Rapp grew resentful” and “bitter” that his career had “peaked in 2000.” She noted that he had surfaced his claims “right after the Harvey Weinstein allegations,” when “all sorts of people are worried about being canceled.”  

The “not liable for battery” verdict for Mr. Spacey in that civil case, delivered at what NPR called “lightning speed” by jurors, occurred despite a 2017 tweet in which Mr. Spacey didn’t deny the charges but professed his “respect and admiration” for Mr. Rapp. 

Mr. Spacey added “I honestly do not remember the encounter… but if I did behave then as he describes, I owe him the sincerest apology for what would have been deeply inappropriate drunken behavior, and I am sorry.”

In that same statement, Mr. Spacey confirmed rumors about his sexuality, saying, “I choose to live now as a gay man,” a coming out that upset “members of the LGBTQ+ community,” he told the court, “because I came out while I was responding to an accusation.”

Regardless of this messy he-said-he-said, Mr. Spacey’s legal team won the Rapp case. In further victories for Mr. Spacey, prosecutors in Nantucket dropped sexual assault charges after a teenage busboy refused to testify about allegations that Mr. Spacey groped him in a bar, and Los Angeles prosecutors declined to bring charges after a different accuser — a massage therapist who said Mr. Spacey groped him — died. 

Even though Mr. Spacey has prevailed against so many legal assaults, he has still paid a price beyond reputation. Mr. Spacey’s publicist and talent agency dropped him. He was fired from his starring role in the Netflix series “House of Cards” and literally erased from major film projects such as “All the Money in the World,” in which his scenes were refilmed using Christopher Plummer.

In August of last year, Los Angeles Superior Court ordered Mr. Spacey to pay the makers of “House of Cards” almost $31 million to cover losses due to his firing over the scandal. He was reduced to roles in low-budget films, with the director of “Peter Five Eight,” Michael Zaiko Hall, telling the New York Post he “would not normally have access to a double Oscar winner at this budget.”

Being found not guilty is a far cry from being declared innocent. Another high-profile star, Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle, learned this same lesson in 1922. He was put on trial three times for the rape and murder of a fan, Virginia Rappe, with the sensational claim that he had crushed her to death during the assault.

After the third not-guilty verdict, the jury issued an unprecedented apology. “Acquittal is not enough,” it read. Arbuckle had been done “a great injustice” with “not the slightest proof,” the jurors said. “We wish him success and hope that the American people will take the judgment of fourteen men and women that Roscoe Arbuckle is entirely innocent and free from all blame.”

Mr. Spacey has been given no such apology, but he is now a free man — and we’ll see if this former leading Hollywood light can reboot his career. An actor of similar wattage, Johnny Depp, appears to be slowly rebuilding his “canceled” career after beating back, in a sensational trial, spousal abuse accusations from his ex-wife, Amber Heard. He and Mr. Spacey can now, like Arbuckle and Donovan, search for that elusive office where the not guilty go to get back their good names.