Who is R.Kelly?
Robert Sylvester Kelly is 54 years old and one of the most influential singers and producers in the R&B genre. He grew up in Chicago, in the rough neighborhood of Bronzeville, and at the age of thirteen he began to excel in high school singing lessons, performing Stevie Wonder. After founding the group Public Announcement, R. Kelly launched his solo career in 1993.
Singer R. Kelly is convicted of racketeering and sex trafficking.
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Later came Grammy nominations, Rolling Stone magazine mentions and Billboard number ones. But the biggest breakthrough came with the song I Believe I Can Fly in 1996, which was part of the soundtrack for the movie Space Jam. This earned him three Grammy Awards, industry acclaim and 38 million records sold. During his career, R. Kelly has collaborated with Justin Bieber, Lady Gaga, Jay-Z and Notorious Big, and has written songs for Michael Jackson, Britney Spears and numerous R&B artists.
Why was he convicted?
The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of New York on Monday charged him with racketeering, coercion and sex trafficking of women and girls for more than two decades. The jury deliberated for nine hours and found that Kelly acted as a predator taking advantage of his fame to abuse women, boys and underage girls, and to destroy the lives of the people who worked for him.
The trial has lasted six weeks during which the prosecution has questioned several women who accuse the artist of sexual abuse and 45 witnesses, some of whom detailed an ongoing pattern of coercion and abuse. The report accuses him of being violent and controlling. Throughout the trial, R. Kelly’s previous trial in Chicago in 2008, from which he got off scot-free, has loomed large. Prosecutors investigated a videotape that showed him having sex with a 14-year-old girl and urinating on her. R. Kelly was acquitted.All charges were dismissed because the victim refused to testify.
R. Kelly today in court (Illustration: Elizabeth Williams/AP/Shutterstock) – @vicbekiempis reports https://t.co/oilVvyqozT pic.twitter.com/zNFe96HRnZ-
Vulture (@vulture) August 18, 2021
When did suspicions jump?
Kelly was arrested in 2019 after being accused of sexual abuse by four women, three of whom were underage, but the scandals date back nearly two decades earlier. As a producer, he sponsored singer Aaliyah. Together they released in 1994 the first album of what would later become an R&B star, Age Ain’t Nothing But a Number. She was 15 and he was 27, and that same year they secretly married.
The music world looked the other way, but those rumors became reality in the documentary Surviving R. Kelly (Netflix), where a crew member admits that the singer went so far as to falsify Aaliyah’s documents. Kelly feared that the artist was pregnant and that he could be accused of child abuse. She died in 2001 in a helicopter crash while returning from shooting a music video.
What was discovered later was even worse, according to his second wife and the mother of his three children, Andrea Lee. According to her, he had to ask her permission before eating any food and constantly locked her in a small room in the house with no contact with the outside world. A year after marrying Lee and releasing the famous Space Jam song, one of the young aspiring singers he kept under his thumb sued him for rape and sexual abuse. Tiffany Hawkins accused him of staging orgies with several 15-year-olds like herself. The lawsuit was settled by check, but years later she participated in the documentary and said she did it because no one believed her. That same year, in 1998, Kelly won three Grammy Awards for I Believe I Can Fly.
2002: possession of child pornography
In 2002 a video came to light in which Kelly had sex with two underage girls. One of them came to urinate on him. While the police investigated the facts, the singer presented the opening ceremony of the Winter Olympics that year. In 2003 he was arrested for possession of child pornography, but a judge noted that the police did not have a warrant and dropped the charges. The trial was eventually held with more evidence in 2008, but the victims did not come forward to testify and the court acquitted Kelly because he could not identify them.
As the child pornography scandals continued, his wife Andrea accused him of abuse and even sought a restraining order. In 2006, R. Kelly’s brother leaked to the press that the singer offered her $50,000 and a record deal if she said he was the subject of the sex tape. Kelly and Andrea filed for divorce in 2009.
The #MeToo Effect that silenced Kelly
In 2017, journalist Jim DeRogatis published an article on BuzzFeed in which the families of three young women accused Kelly of keeping their daughters as sex slaves. The singer had allegedly created a sort of “cult” in which he held and abused women between the ages of 17 and 21. The mothers of these girls returned to participate in Surviving R. Kelly, although some of them were still being held when the documentary was released. In 2018, the Time’s Up campaign helped build momentum for victim credibility. The artist would pick young women who attended his concerts, who would approach him at the end and whom he sexually assaulted backstage. “The victims are not groupies or gold diggers. They are human beings,” said one of the prosecutors.
In 2018, pushed by the #MuteRKelly campaign, Spotify, Apple and Pandora removed Kelly’s discography from their platforms and some of his former collaborators, such as Lady Gaga and Cèline Dion, turned their backs on him. On February 22, 2019, the artist was arrested on ten counts of aggravated sexual abuse, but the lawsuit was delayed because of the pandemic.
In the trial that was settled Monday, according to The New York Times, friends and family members of the victims; eight of his former co-workers; the person who officiated his marriage to Aaliyah; a doctor who treated him for herpes for more than a decade; and several investigators at the Chicago trial in 2008 have testified. A woman identified as Kate testified that she had reached a $200,000 settlement in 2001 after R. Kelly gave him herpes on purpose.
What happens now?
During the trial, R. Kelly refused to testify. According to New York media accounts, he remained seated the entire time dressed in a blue suit, sunglasses and white facemask. “R. Kelly is the worst sexual predator I have seen during my long professional career. For starters, he used the power of his celebrity status to recruit vulnerable underage girls for the purpose of sexually abusing them,” said prosecuting attorney Gloria Allred. The sentence has not yet been decided, but the maximum penalty would carry 20 years in prison.
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