CHICAGO –
A federal jury on Wednesday convicted R. Kelly of multiple counts of child pornography and sexual abuse in his hometown of Chicago, dealing another legal blow to a singer who was one of the biggest R&B stars in the world.
Kelly, 55, was found guilty of three counts of child pornography and three counts of child luring.
But jurors acquitted him on a fourth pornography count, as well as a conspiracy to obstruct justice charge accusing him of tampering with his state child pornography trial in 2008. He was found not guilty on all three counts of conspiracy to obtain of child pornography and two more baiting charges.
His two co-defendants were found not guilty of all charges.
Jurors wrote several questions to the judge Wednesday, with at least one showing panel members struggling with some of the legal complexities of the case.
One asked if they should find Kelly both lured and coerced minors, or that he lured or coerced them. Over the objections of Kelly’s attorney, the judge said they only had to find one.
During the trial, prosecutors tried to paint a picture of Kelly as a master manipulator who used his fame and fortune to lure in star fans, some of them minors, to sexually abuse them and then dump them.
Kelly, born Robert Sylvester Kelly, was desperate to recover child pornography videos he had made and stashed in a gym bag, witnesses said. They said he offered up to $1 million to recover missing videos before the 2008 trial, knowing they would put him in legal jeopardy. The conspiracy to cover up his abuse lasted from 2000 to 2020, prosecutors said.
Kelly associates Derrell McDavid and Milton Brown were co-defendants in the Chicago trial. Jurors acquitted McDavid, Kelly’s longtime business manager, who was charged with conspiring with Kelly to pervert the trial in 2008. Brown, Kelly’s associate for years, was acquitted of obtaining child pornography.
Kelly faces 13 charges. A conviction on just one count of child pornography carries a mandatory minimum sentence of 10 years, while receiving child pornography carries a mandatory minimum of five years. Judges can order defendants previously convicted in separate cases to serve their new sentence concurrently with, or only after, the first term has been served in full. Federal prisoners must serve at least 85% of their sentences.
During closing arguments Tuesday, Kelly’s attorney, Jennifer Bonjian, likened the government’s testimony and evidence to a cockroach and the case to a bowl of soup.
If a cockroach falls into soup, she said, “you can’t just pull the cockroach out and eat the rest of the soup. You throw out all the soup,” he told jurors.
“There are just too many cockroaches,” she said of the prosecution’s case.
The three defendants called only a few witnesses in four days. Co-defendant McDavid, who was on the stand for three days, may have hurt Kelly’s hopes of an acquittal, saying he now doubts Kelly was being sincere when he denied abusing anyone after he heard the superstar’s accusers testify.
In her closing rebuttal, prosecutor Janice Appenting cited testimony that Kelly’s inner circle increasingly focused on what Kelly wanted as his fame blossomed in the mid-1990s.
“And ladies and gentlemen, what R. Kelly wanted was to have sex with young girls,” she said.
Four of Kelly’s accusers testified, all identified by pseudonyms or first names: Jane, Nia, Pauline and Tracy. Some cried when describing the abuse, but otherwise spoke calmly and confidently. The fifth accuser, Brittany, did not testify.
Seated nearby in a suit and face mask, Kelly often averted his eyes and looked down as his accusers spoke.
Several dozen die-hard Kelly fans regularly attended the trial. At least once during a break, several made heart signs to Kelly. He smiled back.
Jane, 37, was the government’s star witness and a key part of the settlement indictment, which accused Kelly of using threats and bribes to get her to lie to a grand jury before his 2008 trial and ensure that she and her parents will not testify.
A single video, which state prosecutors said showed Kelly abusing a girl about 14 years old, was the centerpiece of that trial.
On the witness stand over two days in late August, Jane paused, pulled off a necklace and wiped her eyes with a tissue as she said publicly for the first time that the girl in the video was her 14-year-old self and that the man was Kelly, who would have been at around 30.
Some jurors in the 2008 trial said they had to acquit Kelly because the girl in the video did not testify. At the federal trial in Chicago, Jane said she lied to a state grand jury in 2002 when she said she wasn’t in the video, saying part of the reason she lied was because she cared about Kelly and didn’t want to get him in trouble.
Jane told jurors she was 15 when they first had sex. Asked how many times they had sex before she turned 18, she replied quietly: “Countless times. … Hundreds.
Jane, who was in a teenage singing group, first met Kelly in the late 1990s when she was in junior high school. She had visited Kelly’s recording studio in Chicago with her aunt, a professional singer. Soon after this meeting, Jane told her parents that Kelly would be her godfather.
Jane testified that when her parents confronted Kelly in the early 2000s, he fell to his knees and begged their forgiveness. She said she begged her parents not to take action against Kelly because she loves him.
Defense attorneys suggested that a desire for money and fame led some government witnesses to implicate Kelly, and they accused several people of trying to extort him. They also suggest that at least one of his accusers was 17 — the age of consent in Illinois — when Kelly began pursuing her for sex.
Bonjean pleaded with jurors not to accept the prosecution’s portrayal of her client as a “monster,” saying Kelly was forced to rely on others due to intellectual challenges and that he was sometimes misled.
“Mr. Kelly can be a victim, too,” she said in her opening statement.
Prosecutors played jurors excerpts from three videos that Jane said she was featured on. Court officials placed opaque screens around the jurors so that journalists and spectators could not see the videos or the reactions of the jurors.
But the sound was heard. In one video, the girl is heard repeatedly calling the man “dad”. At one point she asks, “Daddy, do you still love me?” The man gives her explicit sexual instructions.
Prosecutors said Kelly shot the video, which was also evidence in the 2008 trial, in a log cabin room of his home on Chicago’s North Side around 1998.
Another accuser, Pauline, said Jane introduced her to Kelly when they were 14-year-old middle school classmates in 1998. At Kelly’s home in Chicago later that year, Pauline described her shock when told that for it’s the first time she’s entered Kelly and Jane’s naked. She said Kelly told her everyone has secrets. “That’s our secret,” she said.
Pauline told jurors she still cares for Kelly. But as a 37-year-old mother, she said she now has a different perspective.
“If anyone does anything to my children,” she said, “I will kill them. Period.”
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