Spacey’s career long blended highbrow acclaim and mainstream appeal. A stage thespian before he was a film lead, he amassed glittering awards and a prestigious post as the artistic director of the Old Vic theater in London. These are not merely the spoils of a movie star; they are the signifiers of one who approaches his trade as capital-a Art. This particular artist’s muse? Evil. Spacey’s signature turns in The Usual Suspects, Seven, and House of Cards were all charismatic bad guys, and for 1999’s American Beauty, his suburban-dad character, Lester, lusted after a teenage girl. Accepting the Oscar for Best Actor, Spacey said he loved playing Lester “because we got to see all of his worst qualities and we still grew to love him. This movie to me is all about how any single act from any single person put out of context is damnable.”

The “Let Me Be Frank” video may be an attempt to reassert this professional history. Spacey the great actor is implied in his complaint that his scandals led to an “unsatisfying ending” that could have been “memorable”—a likely dig at the poorly reviewed final season of Cards that didn’t feature Frank Underwood. Spacey the philosopher of misdeeds is here, too: “I told you my deepest, darkest secrets,” he says, seeming to speak both as Frank and also as himself, the public figure. “I showed you exactly what people are capable of. I shocked you with my honesty, but mostly I challenged you and made you think. And you trusted me, even though you knew you shouldn’t.”

Read: The Kevin Spacey allegations, through the lens of power

Left unstated is the way that Spacey’s acting career was accompanied by allegations of misbehavior, sexual and otherwise. (He’s apologized to his first public accuser, Anthony Rapp, and denied or remained silent on other allegations.) The Usual Suspects shut down production for two days after Spacey made an advance on a younger actor on set, the actor Gabriel Byrne told The Sunday Times. Producers on House of Cards conducted an investigation and sent Spacey to retraining in 2012 after an inappropriate “remark and gesture.”

Also left unreckoned with in Spacey’s video is the difference between the thrill of fictional villainy and the effects of the real-life kind. One of Spacey’s accusers, the filmmaker Tony Montana, has talked about the PTSD and shame he suffered after Spacey allegedly grabbed him. Another, who says he was 15 when a 24-year-old Spacey tried to rape him, told Vulture, “What he left me with, more than what he took from me, was a sense that I deserved this. And that’s the knot I’m still untangling.”

All of this queasy context is surely part of why Spacey’s video accrued more than 7 million views in just a few days. People are rubbernecking at the disgraced star opting to play the villain. “Kevin Spacey is sending a very disturbing message as he chastises his audience,” the actress Ellen Barkin tweeted. “If you hypocrites loved me as a murderer, why won’t you love me as a sex offender? Maybe because Frank Underwood’s crimes are fiction and Kevin Spacey’s are not.” Wrote Patricia Arquette, “I’m sure none of the men who were kids at the time of their sexual assaults appreciate @KevinSpacey’s weird video.”