 |
| Photo Credit: AP. |
CHICAGO (AP) — A federal jury in Chicago convicted R. Kelly on Wednesday of producing child pornography and enticing girls for sex after a monthlong trial in his hometown, delivering another legal blow to the Grammy Award winning singer who was once one of the world’s biggest R&B stars.
Prosecutors
won convictions on six of the 13 counts against him, with many of the convictions
carrying long mandatory sentences. But the government lost the marquee count —
that Kelly and his then-business manager successfully rigged his state child
pornography trial in 2008.
Both of his
co-defendants, including longtime business manager Derrel McDavid — who had
told jurors that testimony from four Kelly accusers had led him to change his
mind about Kelly’s believability — were acquitted of all charges.
The trial
was, in ways, a do-over of Kelly’s 2008 child pornography trial, with a key video
critical to both. Kelly, who shed tears of joy when jurors acquitted him in
2008, gave a thumbs-up sign to spectators after Wednesday’s verdict but otherwise
showed little emotion.
Before Kelly
was returned to federal lockup, McDavid hugged Kelly, who rose from poverty on
Chicago’s South Side to become a superstar.
Asked by
reporters later outside court how Kelly felt after the verdict, his lead
attorney, Jennifer Bonjean, said: “Mr. Kelly is used to bad news.”
“He’s still
got many fights to fight,” she said. “But what he did say is that he had a
sense of relief that this particular case was in the past now.”
The verdict
comes months after a federal judge in New York sentenced Kelly to 30 years in
prison in June for racketeering and sex trafficking. Based on that sentence,
the 55-year-old won’t be eligible for release until he is around 80.
And two
sexual misconduct trials still await Kelly — one in Minnesota and one in state
court in Chicago.
After
deliberating for 11 hours over two days, jurors convicted Kelly of three counts
each of producing child pornography and enticement, while acquitting him of
obstruction of justice, one count of production of child porn and three counts
of receiving child porn.
Among the
charges McDavid was acquitted of was conspiring with Kelly to rig the 2008
trial. Milton Brown, the other co-defendant, was acquitted of receiving child
pornography.
Chicago-based
U.S. Attorney John Lausch expressed satisfaction with the verdict. He told
reporters that, when you add up the potential punishments on the six guilty
counts, Kelly was staring at at least 10 years and up to 90 in prison.
Judge Harry
Leinenweber did not set a sentencing date. He could order that Kelly serve
whatever sentence he imposes simultaneously with the New York sentence or only
after that one is fully served. The latter would, for practical purposes, mean
a life sentence.
Prosecutors
at the federal trial in Illinois portrayed Kelly as a master manipulator who used
his fame and wealth to reel in star-struck fans, some of them minors, to sexually
abuse then discard them.
Kelly, born
Robert Sylvester Kelly, was desperate to recover pornographic videos he made
and lugged around in a gym bag, witnesses said. They said he offered up to $1
million to recover missing videos before his 2008 trial, knowing they would
land him in legal peril. The conspiracy to hide his abuse ran from 2000 to
2020, prosecutors said.
Some dozen
Kelly fans regularly attended the trial. On at least one occasion during a
break, several made hand signs of a heart at Kelly. He smiled back.
Bonjean,
Kelly’s attorney, told jurors in her closings that the government had relied,
in some cases, on liars and and blackmailers as witnesses. She earlier implored
jurors not to see Kelly as “the monster” she said prosecutors so badly wanted
them to see.
In her
closing rebuttal Tuesday, prosecutor Jeannice Appenteng cited testimony that
Kelly’s inner circle increasingly focused on doing what Kelly wanted as his
fame boomed in the mid-1990s.
“And ladies
and gentlemen, what R. Kelly wanted was to have sex with young girls,” she
said.
All four
Kelly accusers who testified went by pseudonyms or their first names: Jane,
Nia, Pauline and Tracy. Some cried when describing the abuse but otherwise
spoke calmly and with confidence. A fifth accuser, Brittany, didn’t testify,
and jurors acquitted Kelly of the one charge related to her.
Four of his
six convictions were tied directly to Jane and relied largely on her testimony.
She was the
government’s star witness and also pivotal to the trial fixing charge, of which
he was acquitted, and which accused him of using threats and payoffs to get her
to lie to a grand jury before his 2008 trial.
A single
video, which state prosecutors said was Kelly abusing a girl of around 14, was
the focal point of that trial. Three of the child porn charges that Kelly was
convicted of Wednesday were related to that video and others depicting Jane.
Jane, 37,
said publicly for the first time at the just-ended trial that the girl in the
video was her at age 14 and that the man was Kelly, who would have been around
30.
Some jurors
in the 2008 trial said they had to acquit Kelly because the girl in the video
didn’t testify.
Asked on the
witness stand how many times Jane and Kelly had sexually abused her before she
turned 18, Jane answered quietly: “Uncountable times. … Hundreds.”
Jane, who
belonged to a teenage singing group, first met Kelly in the late 1990s when she
was in junior high school. Soon after that, Jane told her parents Kelly was
going to be her godfather.
Jane
testified that when her parents confronted Kelly in the early 2000s he dropped
to his knees and begged them for forgiveness. She said she implored her parents
not to take action against Kelly because she loved him.
Defense
attorneys suggested a desire for money and fame drove some government witnesses
to accuse Kelly, and they accused several people of trying to blackmail him.
Prosecutors
played jurors excerpts from three videos that Jane said featured her. Court
officials set up opaque screens around the jurors so spectators couldn’t see
the videos or the jurors’ reactions.
But the
sound was audible. In one video, the girl is heard repeatedly calling the man
“daddy.” At one point she asks: “Daddy, do you still love me?” The man gives
her sexually explicit instructions.
Prosecutors
have said Kelly recorded the video that was also evidence in the 2008 trial in
a log cabin-themed room at his North Side Chicago home around 1998.
Another
accuser, Pauline, said Jane introduced her to Kelly when they were 14-year-old
middle school classmates in 1998. She told jurors she still cares for Kelly.
But, as a 37-year-old mom, she said she now has a different perspective.
“If somebody
did something to my kids,” she said, “I’m killing ’em. Period.”
Joey
Cappelletti is a corps member for the Associated Press/Report for America
Statehouse News Initiative. Report for America is a nonprofit national service
program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on undercovered
issues.
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