A federal judge in Chicago on Thursday sentenced R. Kelly to 20 years in prison for his convictions on child pornography charges and enticing underage sex. However, he will serve most of that sentence at the same time as a 30-year sentence handed down last year for racketeering and sex trafficking. In a major victory for the defense, US District Judge Harry Leinenweber ruled that the 56-year-old singer has just one more year to serve after completing his three-decade tenure in New York.
A week ago, federal prosecutors requested that Kelly – whose full name is Robert Sylvester Kelly – be given a new 25-year sentence, to be served after he fully completes his 30-year sentence in New York. In their sentencing recommendation to the US District Court in Chicago, prosecutors described Kelly’s behavior as “sadistic” and called him “an unrepentant serial sex offender who “poses a serious threat to society.” “The only way to ensure Kelly doesn’t reoffend is to impose a sentence that keeps him in prison for the rest of his life,” they argued.
However, the singer’s defense wanted a sentence of about 10 years, at the lower end of the range of sentencing guidelines, to be served concurrently with the New Yorker. His attorney, Jennifer Bonjean, said Thursday that Kelly was lucky to survive his 30-year sentence in New York alone. Giving him a consecutive 25-year sentence on top of that “is excessive, it’s symbolic,” she said. “Why? Because it’s R. Kelly.”
Additionally, in the defense sentencing recommendation, Bonjean accused prosecutors and “society in general” of singleing out Kelly, who is black, for behavior that his “white peers” got away with. “None have been prosecuted and none will die in prison,” she wrote. Kelly’s legal team is appealing his convictions in New York and Chicago.
At a trial in Chicago last September, a jury convicted the Grammy Award-winning singer on six out of 13 counts. He was found guilty of three counts of child pornography and three counts of seducing a minor into sex, but was acquitted of seven other counts, including obstruction of justice and conspiracy to obtain child pornography. In Chicago, Kelly’s home state, a conviction on just one child pornography charge carries a mandatory minimum sentence of 10 years. His conviction was considered a significant milestone for the #MeToo movement in the United States.
The allegations against Kelly date back to the early 2000s. In 2002, Chicago music journalist Jim DeRogatis reported to the Chicago Sun-Times that he had received an anonymous videotape allegedly showing Kelly having sex with a 14-year-old boy. The newspaper also reported that Chicago police had begun investigating allegations against Kelly and the same girl three years earlier. At the time, the girl and her parents denied that she had sex with Kelly and that she was the girl on the videotape. A year later, Kelly was charged in Chicago with child pornography related to the sextape. However, when the case went to court in 2008, the singer was taken over.
But the victim – known by the pseudonym Jane – had been in a relationship with the artist for years. She decided to speak out after watching the Lifetime documentary Surviving R. Kelly, which aired in 2019 and contained testimonies from several women who accused the singer of 1990s abuse. She took a stand at last year’s Chicago trial, and for the first time publicly said she was the girl on the sextape. She said she was 14 in the video and that the man was Kelly, who would have been around 30 at the time. She admitted lying when the tape was revealed because she was “ashamed”: “I didn’t want that person to be me either.”
Kelly was one of the biggest R&B stars of the 1990s, best known for the song “I Believe I Can Fly.” But despite his fame, it was common at the time to see him at a McDonald’s in Chicago, luring students from a nearby high school. Jane was one of those girls. She was a member of a music group and met Kelly when she was in high school. She attended his recording studio with an aunt who was a professional singer. Shortly after this meeting, Jane told her parents that Kelly would be her godfather. When her parents found out about the sex tape, Kelly knelt down in front of them and, according to Jane, asked for their forgiveness. She begged her parents not to take action against the musician because she “loved” him.
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