R. Kelly has been found guilty on counts of sexual misconduct and is set to face decades in jail.
A jury in Brooklyn, New York has found RnB singer R. Kelly guilty on 8 counts of sex trafficking and racketeering spanning 3 decades. This comes after accusations that the singer was running a Chicago-based trafficking ring that recruited women, girls, and boys to undergo unwanted sexual abuse and exploitation.
A lawyer for some of Kelly’s victims, Gloria Allred, says that of all the profile predators she has gone after, which includes Weinstein and Epstein, the singer was the worst.
“R. Kelly thought that he could get away with all of this, but he didn’t… Despite the fact that he thought he could control all this, he was wrong”.
This comes at the end of a six-week trial in Brooklyn, that saw brutal testimony specifying Kelly’s abuse. The singer abused victims for breaking the rules, needing permission to use the bathroom, eat, or make personal calls, and needing to call him “Daddy”. “Above all else, he demanded absolute obedience,” US Attorney Maria Cruz Melendez for the trial stated.
Timeline of Events
Kelly has been accused of sexual misconduct since the early 2000s but had yet to be officially charged. One prominent incident involved his illegal marriage to 15-year-old singer Aaliyah in 2005. He was introduced to her by her uncle, having then produced her debut album Age Ain’t Nothing But A Number. Prosecutors brought up how Kelly had bribed Chicago officials to forge marriage documents because she was pregnant at the time. The writer of Aaliyah’s biography, Kathy Iandoli, wrote how this marriage was an attempt by the singer to “legalise his abuse” and that Aaliyah was completely frightened of the man.
While the singer faced charges in 2008, an inability to verify the victim’s ages allowed for an acquittal that allowed him to continue his music career. With the 2017 #MeToo movement however, Buzzfeed wrote an exposé where Kelly was accused of running a sex cult with women against their will. Months later, Jerhonda Pane then went to Buzzfeed, telling them she met the singer when she was 15 and was pressured to enter a sexual relationship with Kelly.
It was in 2019 when the documentary Surviving R. Kelly was released, that saw 48 victims accuse his entourage of silencing victims and protecting Kelly from any accusations. The singer was dropped from his label, and he was soon charged with 10 counts of aggravated criminal sexual abuse. 11 counts of sexual abuse against minors aged 13-16 were then added.
Following his conviction, the #MuteRKelly campaign co-founder, Oronike Odeleye, stated the trial was not only important for getting justice for abused women and children, but for sexual violence amongst Black women.
“We have never had full ownership of our bodies. And we’re at a moment where Black women are no longer accepting that as the price of being Black and female in America”.
While the singer has been charged in New York, he will be officially sentenced in May 2022. His charges in Illinois have yet to be addressed.
