 |
| Photo Credit: AP. |
CHICAGO (AP) — Jurors began deliberating Tuesday at R. Kelly’s federal trial in Chicago, sorting through a month of evidence and arguments to weigh charges accusing the singer of producing child pornography, enticing minors for sex and successfully rigging his 2008 child porn trial.
A day after
prosecutors delivered their closing argument, Kelly’s lead attorney made hers.
Standing at a podium a few feet in front of jurors, Jennifer Bonjean said key
government witnesses were admitted liars who testified with immunity to ensure
they couldn’t be charged.
At times
sounding indignant and raising her voice, Bonjean likened their testimony and
other evidence to a cockroach and the government’s case to a bowl of soup.
“You don’t
just pull out the cockroach and eat the rest of the soup. You throw out the
whole soup,” said told jurors. She said of the prosecution’s case: “There are
just too many cockroaches.”
As Bonjean
spoke, Kelly, wearing a gray suit and black mask, looked calm at a nearby
defense table. He appeared to shake his head slightly a few times while a
prosecutor spoke.
Kelly, 55,
was sentenced in June to 30 years in prison during a separate federal trial in
New York where he was convicted of racketeering and sex trafficking.
Convictions on just a few of the 13 counts Kelly faces at his current trial
could add years to his imprisonment.
Delivering
the government’s rebuttal after Bonjean’s closing, prosecutor Jeannice
Appenteng told jurors to remember the girls and women Kelly allegedly abused.
“When you
are in the quiet of the jury room, consider the evidence in light of who is at
the center of this case. Kelly’s victims: Jane, Nia, Pauline, Tracy and Brittany,”
Appenteng said, referring to five Kelly accusers named in charging documents by
their psydonyms or first names.
Four of them
testified. Brittany did not.
The
prosecutor also pointed to testimony that as Kelly’s fame boomed in the
mid-1990s, his staff and associates increasingly geared everything they did to
what Kelly wanted.
“And ladies
and gentlemen, what R. Kelly wanted was to have sex with young girls,”
Appenteng said.
Earlier,
Bonjean implored jurors not to withdraw to the jury room with an impression of
Kelly informed by media coverage of him in recent years or by prosecutors at
the trial.
“They throw
around labels like sex predator,” she said about prosecutors. “Labels and
sweeping generalizations are distractions meant for you to lose your humanity
for this man.”
She
described Kelly as a flawed genius who has had only “functional illiteracy”
since childhood and was ill-equipped to navigate his celebrity and fortune. She
said having been abused as a child also deeply affected him.
Bonjean said
some witnesses who testified with immunity hadn’t come to the courthouse in
Chicago, Kelly’s hometown, to tell the unvarnished truth.
“They came
in here to tell the government’s version of the truth,” she said.
Among
others, Bonjean cited Kelly ex-girlfriend Lisa Van Allen, who testified about
how she stole a sex tape from a Kelly gym bag in the early 2000s. She also
pointed to former Kelly merchandizing agent Charles Freeman, who testified that
he asked Kelly for $1 million in exchange for returning another, potentially
incriminating, video. Both testified with immunity.
During her
closing Monday, prosecutor Elizabeth Pozolo told jurors that weeks of evidence
proved the singer parlayed his fame to sexually abuse minors and record the
abuse on video. She described Kelly as a secret sexual predator.
“Robert
Kelly abused many girls over many years,” Pozolo said, referring to the Grammy
winner by his full name. “He committed horrible crimes against children. … All
these years later, the hidden side of Robert Kelly has come out.”
Bonjean
twice called for a mistrial Monday, complaining that closing arguments by
attorneys for Kelly co-defendants Derrell McDavid and Milton Brown were
grounded in the presumption that “the world now knows Mr. Kelly is a sex
predator.”
“The
presumption of innocence has been abolished for him,” she said. Judge Harry Leinenweber
denied the requests.
Known for
his smash hit “I Believe I Can Fly” and for sex-infused songs such as “Bump n’
Grind,” Kelly sold millions of albums even after allegations of sexual
misconduct began circulating in the 1990s. Widespread outrage emerged after the
#MeToo reckoning and the 2019 Lifetime docuseries “Surviving R. Kelly.”
Kelly and
McDavid, the singer’s former business manager, are accused of fixing Kelly’s
2008 trial on state child porn charges by intimidating and paying off
witnesses.
Kelly faces
13 counts, including four counts of producing child porn, one count of
conspiring to obstruct justice by rigging the 2008 trial, one count of
conspiring to receive child porn, two counts of actually receiving it and five
counts of enticing minors for sex.
McDavid is
charged with four counts, including two counts of receiving child porn, one of
conspiring to do so and one count of conspiring to obstruct justice by rigging
the 2008 trial.
Brown faces
a single count of conspiring to receive child porn.
Pozolo
focused much of her closing argument on the government’s star witness, an
accuser who went by “Jane” and who said Kelly sexually abused her hundreds of times
starting when she was 14.
“He
performed degrading acts upon her for his own sick pleasure,” Pozolo said.
She reminded
jurors of graphic video footage they had watched, which Jane testified depicted
Kelly, at around age 30, abusing her when she was 14. The videos shown included
one at the heart Kelly’s 2008 trial. Jurors said later they had no choice but
to acquit Kelly because Jane didn’t testify.
“Who uses a
14-year-old child to film a video like this?” she said. “This man. Robert
Kelly.”
Before the
2008 trial, Pozolo said, Kelly and his associates scrambled to recover multiple
sex videos that had gone missing from a collection he often carried around in a
large gym bag.
By doing so,
she said, Kelly associates sought “to cover up the fact that ... R. Kelly, the
R&B superstar, is actually a sexual predator.”
In his
closing, an attorney for McDavid said prosecutors had to show that his client
actually knew about any abuse of Jane by Kelly in the 2000s — not just that it
was likely he knew.
“Did they
prove he knew ... behind a reasonable doubt?” Beau Brindley asked. “They did
not.”
Pozolo balked
at the idea that McDavid had no inkling in the 2000s that the abuse allegations
might be credible after helping to recover missing recordings and handing bags
of cash to people who returned videos McDavid knew could destroy Kelly.
Follow
Michael Tarm on Twitter at https://twitter.com/mtarm and find AP’s full
coverage of the R. Kelly trial at https://apnews.com/hub/r-kelly