R. Kelly, who was sentenced to 30 years in
prison for racketeering and sex trafficking earlier this year, will stand trial
again starting this week, beginning the next chapter of prosecutors’ efforts to
hold him criminally responsible for allegations of
sexual abuse dating back
more than three decades.
اضافة اعلان
The trial is in Chicago, the city Kelly long called
home, and where he faced his first criminal trial in 2008.
This time, federal prosecutors are seeking to hold
Kelly and his associates accountable for working to stymie the earlier trial,
in which a jury acquitted Kelly of producing child sexual abuse imagery. They
are accusing Kelly and a former employee who is also on trial,
Derrel McDavid,
of arranging hush money payments and seeking to conceal evidence that would
have aided prosecutors when they were investigating the singer in the early
2000s.
Kelly, 55, will face charges that he coerced five
minors into sex acts, and several charges related to producing child sexual
abuse imagery. He and McDavid also face charges of receiving child sexual abuse
imagery, during what prosecutors have described as a scheme to recover missing
tapes of Kelly having sex with minors.
A third man — another former employee of Kelly,
Milton Brown — is facing a related charge. All three men have pleaded not
guilty.
The first public disclosure of abuse allegations
came in a 1996 lawsuit, and a steady drip of legal claims and articles followed
over the next two decades. The renewed effort to prosecute Kelly came in 2019,
after the Lifetime documentary broadcast accounts of women who described being
abused and controlled by him, oftentimes when they were teenagers.
One year ago, Kelly stood trial in New York, where a
jury found him guilty of leading a decades long scheme to recruit women and
underage girls for sex. He started serving his 30-year prison term in Brooklyn
before he was transferred to a federal prison in Chicago for the current trial.
What
happened in the 2008 trial?
The 2008 trial was a result
of a 2002 grand jury indictment of Kelly on 21 counts of child pornography,
which were later reduced to 14. The case took years to go to a jury. During
that time, the singer debuted some of the biggest hits of his career, including
“Ignition” and “Step in the Name of Love.”
The trial revolved around a 27-minute tape that
prosecutors said showed Kelly having sex with a teenage girl and urinating on
her. The case hinged on whether the jury was convinced that the people in the
tape were whom the prosecutors said they were. Kelly and the young woman denied
they were the ones on the tape, and neither testified in the trial.
A jury found Kelly not guilty on all charges, and
after the verdict was released, jurors said the young woman’s refusal to
testify was a significant barrier to convicting him.
How
is that relevant to the current trial?
A portion of the trial will
focus on charges that Kelly and his associate, McDavid, conspired to obstruct
the previous federal investigation by paying off people with knowledge of
Kelly’s abuse and seeking to suppress evidence.
Prosecutors accuse Kelly of persuading the minor in
the tape to deny to a grand jury in the early 2000s that she had a sexual relationship
with Kelly and that it was her in the 27-minute video. According to the federal
indictment, Kelly and McDavid arranged payments and bought gifts for the minor
and her parents over a roughly 15-year period to prevent them from speaking to
law enforcement about the abuse.
These hush money payments were part of a broader
effort, prosecutors say, to hide evidence of Kelly’s sexual abuse from
investigators.
In 2001, after state officials started investigating
whether Kelly had been abusing the child at the center of the 2008 trial, Kelly
and his associates realized that several videotapes of the singer sexually
abusing minors had gone missing, according to the indictment in the case. After
that realization, Kelly and McDavid started a multiyear effort to have those
videos returned, paying an unnamed person hundreds of thousands of dollars to
recover them, the indictment said.
Around the time of the first trial in
Chicago,
prosecutors say, the person that Kelly and McDavid hired to find the missing
videos planned a news conference about the existence of footage of Kelly having
sex with minors. According to the indictment, Kelly, McDavid and others paid
the person $170,000 to cancel it.
The charges of receiving child sexual abuse imagery
relate to the effort to recover several missing videos of Kelly engaging in sex
acts with the person at the center of the 2008 trial.
Who
is expected to testify?
Prosecutors have not
revealed exactly who they will call to testify, but court papers suggest that
they now have the cooperation of the woman whose testimony in 2008 was a
missing piece of evidence in their case, as well as her mother.
The indictment also suggests that prosecutors have
the cooperation of four other people who say that Kelly coerced them into sex
when they were underage, between 1996 and 2001.
Judge Harry D. Leinenweber, who will preside over
the case, recently ruled that any accusers called to testify will be able to do
so using pseudonyms.
A lawyer representing Kelly, Jennifer Bonjean, did
not respond to requests for comment on the case. Kelly did not testify in the
trial in Brooklyn.
In a tweet last week, Bonjean wrote that it would be
difficult to find 12 jurors who would be fair “given the media war on my
client.”
“The government starts with an incredible advantage
but we are going to fight like hell to get a jury that will follow the law,”
she wrote.
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