In a Brooklyn courtroom on Tuesday, R. Kelly’s lawyer Deveraux Cannick had a pointed question for one of the singer’s alleged sexual abuse victims. During his cross-examination, Cannick tried repeatedly to elicit a description of how the woman was dancing the first time she met Kelly at a 2015 concert. He then came to what appeared to be his smoking gun.
“You were twerking, weren’t you?”
The woman, who testified anonymously over the course of three days, was in the middle of answering graphic questions about the extreme and systematic degradation that she claimed Kelly inflicted on her over the course of five years, beginning when she was 17. On Tuesday, she said that as punishment for breaking one of Kelly’s rules, he once forced her to have sex with a male he had also groomed, and filmed the encounter. The woman agreed to Cannick’s characterization of her dancing, but at that point what could it have mattered?
Kelly’s federal trial on charges related to racketeering and trafficking began in U.S. District Court last week. The singer, who has denied all the charges against him, faces an additional federal trial in Chicago on 13 counts including obstruction and child pornography. Kelly has been trailed by accusations of sexual misconduct since the 1990s, and two alleged victims who have testified so far in his current trial have added disturbing detail to those allegations.
As Nicole Blank Becker, another lawyer for Kelly, suggested last week, the defense’s strategy has primarily focused on casting doubt on the motivations of the alleged victims. Becker’s hours-long opening remarks veered between disjointed and mistaken, with her once urging the jury to find her client guilty before quickly correcting herself. She described the witnesses to come as financially driven, embittered fans with an agenda.
“Some enjoyed the notoriety of being able to tell their friends that they’re with a superstar,” Becker said in her statement.
In cross-examination on Thursday, Cannick put a finer point on the approach by asking Jerhonda Pace, who alleges that Kelly began sexually abusing her when she was 16, if she was a groupie.
“You were in fact stalking him, right?” Cannick asked.
“That is not right,” Pace replied.
The defense’s attempts to find inconsistencies in witnesses’ accounts have yielded some bizarre results. Cannick asked Pace somewhat incredulously how it was possible that she went from age 14 in April 2008 to age 16 in May 2009, prompting Pace to explain that her birthday is April 19.
On Wednesday, Cannick continued his cross-examination of the second accuser. He asked her to read a long letter she had purportedly written to her brother, in which she claimed that her parents were pressuring her to begin a sexual relationship with Kelly as a way to extort him. But by this point in the trial—with so many of Kelly’s alleged methods of control already laid out—this wasn’t so much damning evidence as a detour for the prosecution to explore.
During the government’s follow-up questions, the woman testified that her brother never saw the letter. She said that Kelly told her exactly what to say in the letter, which he would keep for protection for himself in the event of a trial like this one.
Kelly came into his trial with a legal team—Cannick, Becker, Thomas Farinella, and Calvin Scholar—that had recently gone through an acrimonious reshuffle. Two more of Kelly’s lawyers, Steven Greenberg and Michael Leonard, quit the case in June after a series of conflicts with Becker and Farinella. “You sort of want to take the high road but they’re just really fucking him over, these two,” Greenberg told the New York Daily News at the time. “We don’t want to be with people who don’t have any experience and don’t want to do the work.” Judge Ann Marie Donnelly questioned Becker in a pre-trial hearing about whether she had a conflict of interest because of her previous contact with two of Kelly’s former live-in girlfriends, one of whom is now expected to testify as a witness for the government.
Neither Becker nor Farinella has previous federal trial experience, and Farinella had his law license suspended in 2011 after allegations that he improperly used a client’s credit card and otherwise neglected clients’ affairs.
From the press room—an overflow room with a courtroom video feed, as ordered by Donnelly because of coronavirus concerns—the impact of Kelly’s defense’s tactics can be murky. Kelly has rarely reacted throughout testimony, and the jurors aren’t visible. But the horrors of the alleged abuse have so far seemed to eclipse the defense’s implication that the victims invited it. All the while, the more that Kelly’s lawyers have tried to make the alleged victims appear scattered, the more they have looked it themselves.
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