R. Kelly

The R&B star was convicted in New York last year of sexual exploitation of a child, bribery, sex trafficking and racketeering.

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The R&B singer, 55, had been found guilty of sex trafficking and racketeering involving women, girls and boys.

In federal court in Chicago, he is charged with enticement of a minor, possession of child abuse images and obstruction of justice. Kelly’s case attracted attention in light of the #MeToo movement, in which powerful men have been held to account for sexual misconduct and sexual assault. While prosecutors sought a minimum 25-year term, Kelly’s defence pushed for a sentence of 10 years or less. At the trial, victims had described how Kelly, real name Robert Sylvester Kelly, subjected them to perverse and sadistic whims when they were underage. “We are no longer the preyed-upon individuals we once were.” You taught them that love is enslavement and violence.”

A judge sentenced R. Kelly to 30 years in prison Wednesday after a jury found him guilty on nine counts of sex trafficking and racketeering.

"I was afraid, naive and didn’t know to handle the situation," she said, so she didn’t speak up at the time. Kelly did not take the stand during his trial. Allegations that Kelly abused young girls began circulating publicly in the 1990s. A third woman, sobbing and sniffling as she spoke, said Kelly’s conviction restored her faith in the legal system. Victims “have sought to be heard and acknowledged,” she said. Prosecutors filed a memo June 8 stating that Kelly deserves at least 25 years behind bars for sexually abusing women and girls. A jury of seven men and five women found the 55-year-old guilty on Sept. 27, after just two days of deliberations. The charges were based on an argument that Kelly's entourage of managers and aides helped the singer meet girls and keep them obedient and quiet. These actions amounted to a criminal enterprise under federal laws, according to U.S. attorneys. It’s a case about violence, cruelty and control," Donnelly told him. "Do you remember that?” A New York federal judge has sentenced R&B superstar R. Kelly to 30 years in prison after he was found guilty of nine counts of sex trafficking and racketeering in September.

Despite facing allegations of sexual misconduct stretching back more than three decades, R. Kelly did not begin to face criminal penalties for his actions ...

Mr. Kelly will now likely spend the rest of his life behind bars. Within a year, several of his concerts were canceled and Time’s Up, the prominent anti-harassment charity, released an open letter asking corporations that had ties to the singer to end them. Jurors said that they began to have doubts after the girl at the center of the case declined to testify. The defense lawyers had “filed so many motions that they helped delay the start of the trial for six years,” The New York Times reported. He also detailed the accounts of Jerhonda Pace, an accuser who had not previously spoken out publicly. Around the same time, Mr. DeRogatis, the journalist, wrote articles for BuzzFeed about disturbing allegations that the entertainer was keeping women in a cult. The ex-manager said he had to bribe an Illinois government employee to obtain a fake ID for Aaliyah that showed she was 18. Mr. Kelly was taken into custody in Florida after a grand jury in Chicago returned a 21-count indictment. The case centered on a 27-minute sex tape that prosecutors said showed him having sex with a minor. The suit was later settled for $250,000. Jim DeRogatis, a reporter at the Chicago newspaper, and a colleague wrote that Mr. Kelly had “used his position of fame and influence as a pop superstar to meet girls as young as 15 and have sex with them.” A former manager testified at trial that Mr. Kelly, who was 27 at the time of the ceremony, had feared that Aaliyah was pregnant, and that Mr. Kelly had sought to avoid prosecution for statutory rape by marrying her.

NEW YORK Disgraced R&B superstar R. Kelly was sentenced Wednesday to 30 years in prison for using his fame to sexually abuse young fans, including some who ...

But that doesn’t mean that he can accept responsibility in the way that the government would like him to and other people would like him to. Witnesses said they were married in matching jogging suits using a license falsely listing her age as 18; he was 27 at the time. Victims “have sought to be heard and acknowledged,” another one of his accusers said at his sentencing. The women who spoke at Kelly’s sentencing were identified only by first names or pseudonyms. He beat child pornography charges in Chicago in 2008, when a jury acquitted him. Because he disagrees with the characterizations that have been made about him,” she said. As an adult with “literacy deficiencies,” the star was “repeatedly defrauded and financially abused, often by the people he paid to protect him,” his lawyers said. Kelly, 55, didn’t give a statement and showed no reaction on hearing his penalty, which also included a $100,000 fine. “You made me do things that broke my spirit. The sentence caps a slow-motion fall for Kelly, who is known for work including the 1996 hit “I Believe I Can Fly” and the cult classic “Trapped in the Closet,” a multipart tale of sexual betrayal and intrigue. Kelly’s lawyer, Jennifer Bonjean, said he was “devastated” by the sentence and saddened by what he had heard. “I was afraid, naive and didn’t know to handle the situation,” she said, so she didn’t speak up at the time.

The prison term marks the culmination of Mr. Kelly's stunning downfall. In court, the women he victimized gave wrenching accounts.

Hours after the singer pleaded not guilty to the charges that led to his 2008 trial, he sang alongside children at a church in Chicago. “I don’t know why all these people turned a blind eye,” said the judge, who also ordered Mr. Kelly to pay a $100,000 fine. (He was acquitted on all counts after the girl declined to testify at trial.) Six years later, The Chicago Sun-Times published an investigation into accusations that the singer was having sex with underage girls. “You taught them that love is enslavement and violence,” the judge said, recalling the scenarios he created to wreak primal humiliation on them. She had first encountered Mr. Kelly with hopes of helping a friend land an audition, she said, but the singer coerced her into sex. “I don’t know if I’ll ever be whole,” the woman continued. Mr. Kelly was prepared for prison, she said, but “has regrets and is sad.” “You had a system in place that lured young people into your orbit — and then you took over their lives.” On Wednesday, Mr. Kelly, 55, could no longer escape the fallout: He was sentenced to 30 years in prison for racketeering and sex trafficking. The sentencing that followed a September conviction culminated Mr. Kelly’s staggering downfall, from a chart-topping hitmaker known as the king of R&B to a pariah whose musical legacy has become inextricable from his abuses. Around the same time, he began having sex with a 15-year-old girl, according to her subsequent lawsuit.

R&B singer R. Kelly was sentenced to 30 years in prison on Wednesday (June 29), nine months after a New York jury found him guilty of racketeering and sex ...

Gunn also made his way to Brooklyn to attend the Kelly trial last September. He was also accused of participating in bribing an official in order to facilitate the marriage, which was annulled months later. The verdict arrives just days after R. Kelly fan Christopher Gunn was charged with threatening three federal prosecutors in New York in connection to the verdict. And given Kelly’s history of videotaping sex, they feared he would use those tapes as blackmail in order to keep them quiet. His previous employees and associates, many of which stood by as the incidents occurred, corroborated the testimonies of victims. U.S. District Judge Ann Donnelly announced the sentence at a federal court in Brooklyn after hearing statements from victims.

R&B star R. Kelly was sentenced to 30 years in prison Wednesday for using his superstardom to subject young fans — some just children — to systematic sexual ...

She was promised mentorship but quickly ended up “a sex slave,” she said Wednesday outside court. Witnesses said they were married in matching jogging suits using a license falsely listing her age as 18; he was 27 at the time. But that doesn’t mean that he can accept responsibility in the way that the government would like him to and other people would like him to. He beat child pornography charges in Chicago in 2008, when a jury acquitted him. Several women who spoke at Kelly’s sentencing were identified only by first names or pseudonyms. Because he disagrees with the characterizations that have been made about him,” she said. Kelly, 55, didn’t give a statement and showed no reaction on hearing his penalty, which also included a $100,000 fine. As an adult with “literacy deficiencies,” the star was “repeatedly defrauded and financially abused, often by the people he paid to protect him,” his lawyers said. “You made me do things that broke my spirit. The sentence caps a slow-motion fall for Kelly, who is known for work including the 1996 hit “I Believe I Can Fly” and the cult classic “Trapped in the Closet,” a multipart tale of sexual betrayal and intrigue. Kelly’s lawyer, Jennifer Bonjean, said he was “devastated” by the sentence and saddened by what he had heard. “I was afraid, naive and didn’t know how to handle the situation,” she said, so she didn’t speak up at the time.

The R&B singer, 55, could spend the rest of his life in prison after being convicted of decades of psychological and sexual abuse.

Mr. Kelly will receive his prison term on Wednesday; he could spend the rest of his life behind bars. Within a year, several of his concerts were canceled and Time’s Up, the prominent anti-harassment charity, released an open letter asking corporations that had ties to the singer to end them. Jurors said that they began to have doubts after the girl at the center of the case declined to testify. The defense lawyers had “filed so many motions that they helped delay the start of the trial for six years,” The New York Times reported. Federal prosecutors wrote in their sentencing letter that Mr. Kelly has shown no remorse and for decades, “exhibited a callous disregard” for the effects of his abuse on victims. The ex-manager said he had to bribe an Illinois government employee to obtain a fake ID for Aaliyah that showed she was 18. He was first accused of having sex with underage girls in the 1990s, and his illegal marriage to the singer Aaliyah in 1994, who was 15 at the time, prompted questions about his behavior. Kelly, who wore black eyeglasses and a khaki shirt, appeared to take notes as Donnelly addressed the court. As the hearing proceeds, R. Kelly is is sitting between his attorneys while Donnelly reads through the sentencing guidelines and discusses disputes between prosecutors and the defense team. And Mr. Kelly himself may make public statements for the first time, after declining to take the stand at his trial. Mr. Kelly said in a 2016 interview with GQ that he was sexually abused while growing up. “He committed these crimes using his fame and stardom as both a shield, which prevented close scrutiny or condemnation of his actions,” prosecutors wrote.

Jovante Cunningham, an R. Kelly survivor, pauses to take a reporter's question Wednesday outside federal court in Brooklyn, New York. (John Minchillo / ...

She flew there and was immediately locked in a hotel room for a few days, she said, then was finally fed something she had asked for off the hotel menu. “I’ve been followed, I’ve been approached at networking events,” she said, also on the Zoom call. Physical, emotional and sexual abuse followed into 1999, according to her book, “ Jane Doe #9.” “I’m grateful for today. “This happened to me a long time ago. “I never got my interview.” And I’m grateful that Robert Sylvester Kelly is away and will stay away and will not be able to harm anyone else.” Fears of retaliation and intimidation by fans, supporters of R. Kelly, vendors of R. Kelly.” “He did all of this in secret, so now he gets rewarded openly.” None of that is true,” she said. “So I’m excited to hear what’s going to happen and how our judicial system will continue to handle the justice process for us as victims. None of that is true.

Multiplatinum R&B singer R. Kelly will be sentenced on Wednesday for exploiting his stardom and wealth over decades to lure women and underage girls into ...

read more They argued he demonstrated a "callous disregard" for his victims and showed no remorse. He has repeatedly denied sexual abuse accusations.

R. Kelly has been sentenced to 30 years in prison for using his R&B superstardom to subject young fans to systematic sexual abuse.

Witnesses said they were married in matching jogging suits using a license falsely listing her age as 18; he was 27 at the time. Victims “have sought to be heard and acknowledged,” another one of his accusers said at his sentencing. The women who spoke at Kelly’s sentencing were identified only by first names or pseudonyms. The Grammy-winning, multi-platinum-selling songwriter was convicted last year of racketeering and sex trafficking at a trial that gave voice to accusers who had previously wondered if their stories were being ignored because they were Black women. It’s a case about violence, cruelty and control,” U.S. District Judge Ann Donnelly told Kelly on Wednesday. He beat child pornography charges in Chicago in 2008, when a jury acquitted him. Kelly is known for work including the 1996 hit “I Believe I Can Fly” and the cult classic “Trapped in the Closet,” a multi-part tale of sexual betrayal and intrigue. The accusers alleged they were ordered to sign nondisclosure forms and were subjected to threats and punishments such as violent spankings if they broke what one referred to as “Rob’s rules.” “You made me do things that broke my spirit. Kelly, born Robert Sylvester Kelly, used his “fame, money and popularity” to systematically “prey upon children and young women for his own sexual gratification,” prosecutors wrote in a court filing earlier this month. As an adult with “literacy deficiencies,” the star was “repeatedly defrauded and financially abused, often by the people he paid to protect him,” his lawyers said. “I was afraid, naive and didn’t know to handle the situation,” she said, so she didn’t speak up at the time.

Chicago-born singer R. Kelly was sentenced to 30 years in prison on Wednesday after being convicted of sex trafficking in New York, and reaction is pouring ...

“The situation that happened to us when we was kids, that was never tended to,” he said. I was a young Black girl.’” “It’s bittersweet, I think, because it took so long to happen.”

Recording artist was convicted last year of nine charges related to sex trafficking and racketeering.

Kitti Jones in 2019 in Santa Monica, California. Amy Sussman/Getty Images. “Many have been waiting for this day to come.” Kitti Jones entered a Brooklyn ...

Your honor, my hope is that the amount of time being asked by the prosecutors is given, considering the long list of survivors and our families and the many lives that have been affected and forever changed. I’ve had therapy and counseling to cope with my time living with him and learned how not to blame myself. I vowed to never speak on my time with him or tell his darkest secrets; I planned to take the things he had done to me to my grave. I got wind that he was doing to others what he had done to me and I panicked at the thought of someone much younger than me having to experience those things, and the emotional and mental impact it would have years later. After I left his home at the end of 2013, I still had the mindset to never tell. I no longer wanted to give Robert Kelly the luxury of my silence, so I decided not to be anonymous.

Disgraced singer was convicted on federal charges last year ... R&B singer R. Kelly in 2019 arriving at the Leighton Criminal Court in Chicago for arraignment on ...

Lena McLin, the Chicago-area music teacher that served as both a mentor and “second mother” to Kelly, told Rolling Stone in a statement Wednesday, “This news is truly heartbreaking, but I hope this situation will help bring forth a period of repentance and remorse upon his soul. Though Kelly’s New York trial is now officially wrapped with his sentencing, he will still face charges against him in Chicago. There, Kelly is facing 13 charges of child pornography, enticing a minor into illegal sexual activity, and a conspiracy to obstruct justice, the latter charge tied to Kelly’s previous child pornography trial. I sincerely pray that peace and healing will be granted to all those affected, and pray that Robert uses this time to reflect on the choices that led to all of this.” “With the aid of his fame, his money, and most importantly his inner circle, R. Kelly preyed upon children and young women for his own sexual gratification for decades,” U.S. Attorney Breon Peace said after sentencing. (Kelly denied all the allegations against him and filed an appeal against his conviction earlier this year.) Though the federal indictment was centered around accusations leveled from six women — three of whom said they were underage when Kelly began having sex with them — Kelly’s trial featured testimony from 11 accusers and more than 40 witnesses. Then in 2002, he was indicted on child pornography, but the ensuing trial ended in a not guilty verdict on all 14 counts. “You taught them that love is enslavement and violence.” In handing down the sentence, the judge also acknowledged Kelly’s child pornography trial, where he was acquitted, as an opportunity to turn his life around. In 1994, he illegally married the singer Aaliyah when she was 15 and he was 27; it was annulled a few months later. The defense lawyer also hailed Kelly as a “musical genius.” “Mr. Kelly rejects that’s he’s this monster,” Bonjean said. In asking the judge for leniency, Kelly’s lawyer Jennifer Bonjean said that the singer spent his childhood in a “highly chaotic” home where he was also sexually abused. Prior to sentencing, seven of Kelly’s survivors addressed the court to share impact statements and speak directly to their abuser.

R. Kelly was endlessly memeable, giving the works of a now-convicted sex trafficker cultural cachet for far longer than was reasonable.

In a concert in Ethiopia, Kelly openly asks the crowd if they have their passports and want to come home with him. As Kelly’s work continued to be popular as memes—divorced from actually being associated with him—he was allowed to continue to prey on women and children in the open. The act of stripping R. Kelly away and replacing him with a white person—a cover singer, a karaoke bro, a group of college kids drinking—became its own joke. This was a status that gave him an immense amount of power in the music industry, power that he used to repeatedly abuse young women and children. Like most memes, the remixing of R. Kelly stripped the songs of their context and allowed people to guiltlessly enjoy them, giving the works of a now-convicted sex trafficker cultural cachet for far longer than was reasonable. Outside of that community, and in particular to white people, R. Kelly’s music wasn’t the most important thing about him.

R&B star R. Kelly was sentenced to 30 years in prison Wednesday for using his superstardom to subject young fans — some just children — to systematic sexual ...

She was promised mentorship but quickly ended up “a sex slave,” she said Wednesday outside court. Witnesses said they were married in matching jogging suits using a license falsely listing her age as 18; he was 27 at the time. But that doesn’t mean that he can accept responsibility in the way that the government would like him to and other people would like him to. He beat child pornography charges in Chicago in 2008, when a jury acquitted him. Several women who spoke at Kelly’s sentencing were identified only by first names or pseudonyms. Because he disagrees with the characterizations that have been made about him,” she said. Kelly, 55, didn’t give a statement and showed no reaction on hearing his penalty, which also included a $100,000 fine. As an adult with “literacy deficiencies,” the star was “repeatedly defrauded and financially abused, often by the people he paid to protect him,” his lawyers said. “You made me do things that broke my spirit. The sentence caps a slow-motion fall for Kelly, who is known for work including the 1996 hit “I Believe I Can Fly” and the cult classic “Trapped in the Closet,” a multipart tale of sexual betrayal and intrigue. Kelly’s lawyer, Jennifer Bonjean, said he was “devastated” by the sentence and saddened by what he had heard. “I was afraid, naive and didn’t know how to handle the situation,” she said, so she didn’t speak up at the time.

"People have decided they're sick of hearing these stories," dream hampton, co-executive producer of the 2019 Lifetime docuseries, tells The Times.

What we’re seeing now with the reversal of Cosby’s sentencing … I would even say what just happened with Amber Heard . We’re absolutely in the blowback phase of #MeToo. People have decided that they’re sick of hearing these stories of the suffering. That money is a direct result of people going to the Little Caesars Arena in Detroit, where we filmed outside that concert. Encouraging people to divest is a different kind of currency, which is the love that Black people in particular have for him. That love that he had from Black people was something that the Mute R. Kelly organizers were encouraging folks to divest from... What we learned from the survivors, from different eras, is that they all were forced to write these false confessions. One of the most direct ways you put money in an artist’s pocket is to go see them in concert. A big part of the state of his finances now has to do with how expensive this operation was. How were you able to pull the documentary together in such a culture of fear and apathy. The Palestinians. It’s a nonviolent way of targeting and hitting them in their pocket. We opened “Surviving R. Kelly” with his Facebook post where he said he was in a bar with a cigar. I was asked why John Legend was one of the only artists who talked… I’m so grateful for the reporting that was done throughout the years, from Jim [DeRogatis] and other folks.

In 2000, Chicago journalist Jim DeRogatis broke further accusations of Kelly having had sex with underage girls. He kept on the story for years, uncovering even ...

And I think it’s going to be the same in August when the second federal trial starts, because those videotapes, as I’ve heard from my sources, are just beyond horrifying. I think after my reporting for Buzzfeed in 2017 about the cult, and the #MuteRKelly movement being inspired to launch because of that story, that leads to Surviving R. Kelly and having these women in your living room, one after another, tell their stories as they did to me for 22 years in conference rooms and in meetings where it was just us. To be clear, all of those women, they never said, “I hate that evil monster.” What I heard again and again was, “The brother needs help. In all of the years I’ve covered this, I thought I’d heard everything, but there were still victims who testified, including the two young men—I had never heard those stories. I don’t say “allegedly,” because it has now been proved in a court of law in front of a jury of his peers, and he’s going to spend the rest of his life in prison. We’ve seen something similar with the misinformation around the Depp-Heard trial, and how a lot of the same people fueling that are now trying to downplay the Marilyn Manson allegations as well. The problems of race and the problems of treating women equitably and without abuse are deep. But there is a deep strain of racism and misogyny in this country, and that’s what we’re seeing come out in these people. Nobody [in the industry] has ever been accused of that many crimes that were proved in a court of law, and it truly is singular. Nobody in the history of popular music has ever been convicted in all of pop music history of charges of the breadth and depth of Robert Sylvester Kelly’s. He had a song, “The World’s Greatest,” to which I would only append “The World’s Greatest Predator,” at least in pop music. I think that the breadth and depth of the evidence that the team of several dozen federal investigators compiled for these two federal cases far outshines the technicality on which Cosby and his verdict was overturned. I haven’t gotten to talk in enough detail about this, but every system in Chicago failed these young Black girls, for 30 years, in the full glare of the brightest spotlight imaginable for a superstar who was selling 100 million records, generating $1 billion in income for Jive Records, and then RCA, and then Sony, with half a billion dollars going into his own pocket.

R&B singer and songwriter R. Kelly was sentenced to 30 years in federal prison after being convicted of nine counts of federal racketeering and sex ...

In 2018, DeRogatis reported that Kelly was being accused of running a cult by the parents of a young woman living at his home. If it weren’t for their fortitude and their insistence that justice be done, Kelly would still be seeking new girls to harm. Black women sharing, in their own words, what Kelly had done to them did something that nothing else could: It made people more empathetic to their plight. Three years before his acquittal in that sex-tape case, a 2005 episode of Cartoon Network’s “ The Boondocks” predicted he wouldn’t be convicted with an episode about R. Kelly standing trial for urinating on an underage girl. That’s when Oronike Odeleye and Kenyette Barnes created the #MuteRKelly movement to encourage a boycott of Kelly’s music. But the girl who prosecutors say was in the video refused to testify, and Kelly was found not guilty in 2008. When I wrote about it, tweeted about it and even spoke with my family about it, I was met with escalating hostility that eventually resulted in my being doxxed. He broke the news of the sex tape that prosecutors said showed the singer performing sex acts on a teenage girl and led to Kelly being charged in 2003 with 14 counts of child pornography. Some of those survivors held hands and prayed during his sentencing, showing Kelly that while he harmed those girls, they’re now women whom he couldn’t break. “There wasn’t a day in my life up until this moment that I actually believed that the judicial system would come through for Black and brown girls. It's because Black women — including Kelly’s former background singer Sparkle, journalist Jamilah Lemieux, writer Mikki Kendall, filmmaker dream hampton and activist Tarana Burke, to name a few — continued to sound the alarm, even when it was costly and dangerous to do so. Kelly used his fame and wealth to lure underage girls into his orbit, isolate them from their families and control and abuse them.

'Surviving R. Kelly' Producers and Survivor Lisa Van Allen on 30-Year Sentencing: 'This Is Just the Beginning' (EXCLUSIVE). By Elizabeth ...

She then entered into a complicated relationship with him, and was part of a sex tape that she said she was coerced into when appearing in “Surviving R. Kelly.” Years and years and numerous allegations later, the tables began to turn after he was subject of Lifetime’s “ Surviving R. Kelly,” which aired in January 2019. “It brings me nothing but joy to know that I am, and will continue, to be part of the solution. Shortly after the docuseries aired, R. Kelly was dropped by his label, and the following month, he was formally charged with multiple counts of sexual abuse. Van Allen first met the singer on the set of a music video when she was a minor. Van Allen was the star witness in 2008 when R. Kelly was in court for child pornography. Following the Lifetime docuseries, R. Kelly then sat down for an infamously uncomfortable interview with CBS News’ Gayle King, which catapulted his shocking story even further into the mainstream limelight to the point where it could no longer be ignored, as it had been for so long. I do it for anyone who feels voiceless — know that you are not alone. “Surviving R. Kelly” attracted high praise from critics and garnered large viewership as Lifetime’s top program at the time. In 2002, R. Kelly was indicted on 21 counts of making child pornography, but was acquitted. This week, R. Kelly was sentenced to 30 years in prison. The docuseries put his victims on-camera to detail the sexual abuse they claimed they endured at the hands of the singer.