For more than two decades of R. Kelly’s career, allegations of sexual abuse have followed the R&B star. Beginning in the 1990s, Kelly has been repeatedly accused of sexually abusing minors and keeping young women and girls in captivity—all of which he has denied, and little of which immediately stuck. The 54-year-old singer has resolved several civil suits outside of court beginning in 1996; he continued to accumulate Grammy nominations well after he was indicted on 21 counts of making child pornography in 2002. Seven of the charges were later dropped and Kelly was acquitted of the remaining 14 in 2008. He maintained a steady run of high-profile collaborations and festival appearances, playing a growing slate of hit songs that already included “Ignition (Remix)” and “I Believe I Can Fly.”
Kelly’s public image has substantially shifted in the last few years, and on Wednesday, federal prosecutors will make their opening statements in a racketeering trial in which, if convicted on all counts, Kelly faces a sentence between 10 years and life imprisonment. In 2017, the critic and reporter Jim DeRogatis, who has been reporting on Kelly’s alleged abuse since the early 2000s, published an investigation for BuzzFeed News that brought an influx of attention to the singer’s history. The same year, the activists Kenyette Barnes and Oronike Odeleye founded the #MuteRKelly campaign, escalating the momentum of calls for justice, and in 2019, the widely dissected Lifetime documentary series Surviving R. Kelly featured accounts from several of the singer’s accusers.
Kelly was arrested in July 2019 and indicted on a total of 18 federal charges—13 counts in Chicago and five counts in New York, where the charges included racketeering and the sexual exploitation and trafficking of children. He was held without bail at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in his hometown of Chicago until June, when he was transferred to the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, ahead of his trial in the Eastern District of New York. He faces an additional federal trial back in Chicago, where he was indicted on charges of child pornography and obstruction, that is set to begin on September 13. Kelly has pleaded not guilty to all the charges.
In trying Kelly on racketeering charges, federal prosecutors in New York are seeking to recast his glittering music career as a mechanism by which he orchestrated a ring of sexual abuse. The Brooklyn indictment alleges that he led a criminal enterprise, consisting in part of his entourage, drivers, and bodyguards, that systematically recruited girls and young women for illegal sexual activity and kept them under a net of isolating measures and threats. “By promoting R. Kelly’s music and the R. Kelly brand,” the indictment says, “the members of the Enterprise expected to receive financial opportunities and personal benefits, including increased power and status within the Enterprise.”
The use of the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act to prosecute Kelly is somewhat unusual and creative, as the Chicago Tribune recently noted, given that the law was enacted with organized crime in mind and has typically been applied in such contexts. But the tactic is in keeping with recent history in the EDNY, where RICO has been used in the cases of Keith Raniere’s NXIVM sex cult and corruption within FIFA. The strategy also allows prosecutors to convey the extensive sweep of Kelly’s alleged misconduct, and they have said they plan to introduce evidence involving at least 19 women, seven of whom were minors at the time of the alleged abuse, as well as one 17-year-old boy who Kelly allegedly sexually abused after meeting him at a McDonald’s in 2006. Kelly has not been charged with crimes directly related to all of these accusers, but prosecutors argued in a July motion to the court that the evidence is relevant to their theory of his enterprise.
On the other side, Kelly’s legal team has been in some turmoil in recent months. In June, two of his lawyers withdrew from the case after an explosive hearing in which they were vocally skeptical of the capabilities of Kelly’s two newer lawyers, as The New York Times reported at the time. The New York Daily News reported that one of those two new attorneys, Nicole Blank Becker, was recently questioned by the judge in the case, Ann Donnelly, about whether she has a conflict of interest owing to her previous contact with two women who were both in a live-in relationship with Kelly when he was arrested in 2019. The two women, Azriel Clary and Joycelyn Savage, previously defended Kelly in an interview with CBS’s Gayle King. But Clary, who is named as Jane Doe #5 in court documents but commonly identified in media reports, now says she has been abused by Kelly.
In 2019, 17 years after Kelly was indicted on child pornography charges and 25 years after his brief marriage to a 15-year-old Aaliyah—whose 1994 debut album, Age Ain’t Nothing But a Number, was mostly written and produced by Kelly—his label RCA Records dropped him. In addition to highlighting the dramatic swing in Kelly’s popular perception since the1990s, the trial also promises to revisit the alleged abuses he committed at his commercial and artistic height, specifically his annulled marriage to the late Aaliyah, who is named as Jane Doe #1 in the case but has been identified in the press. Prosecutors allege that a Kelly associate bribed an Illinois government official in 1994 to produce a fake I.D. for Aaliyah saying she was 18, in order for Kelly to marry her the next day. In a pre-trial motion, the U.S. attorney’s office said that Kelly came up with the arrangement after he came to believe that Aaliyah was pregnant. “In an effort to shield himself from criminal charges related to his illegal sexual relationship with Jane Doe #1,” prosecutors wrote, “Kelly arranged to secretly marry her to prevent her from being compelled to testify against him in the future.”
Kelly’s alleged victims have been predominantly young Black women and girls. In a petition to the judge in the case, a group of media outlets asked for access to the courtroom for Kelly’s trial because the trial stands “at the nexus of critical issues of race, gender, and sexual violence.” Judge Donnelly ultimately denied the request, citing coronavirus concerns, and reporters will instead observe the proceedings from a video conference streamed into two overflow rooms. Throughout pretrial proceedings, Kelly, once a bombastic pop presence, has been relegated largely to courtroom sketches and reported accounts of his court appearances. Kelly’s last widely viewed public appearance was in his 2019 interview with Gayle King. The sit-down saw Kelly plead his innocence and insist that he had been victimized by public opinion and the media—occasionally literally grandstanding to do so. By then the image of eccentric musical genius he had enjoyed throughout his career had given way to something much darker, largely thanks to the testimony of his alleged victims and the reporters and activists who brought those accounts to the fore. Kelly’s musical fame has only further receded in the interim. If prosecutors in New York—and then Chicago—have their way, it may be firmly replaced by an unsettling portrait of the ways in which he is alleged to have deployed it.
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