On Wednesday, disgraced R&B artist R. Kelly was found guilty on three counts of child enticement into criminal sexual activity and on three counts of producing child sexual abuse imagery. A 12-person jury convicted the 55 year old on six of 13 charges against him. Those six crimes involved the same 14-year-old girl who goes by the pseudonym Jane.
Kelly was acquitted on charges that he conspired to obstruct justice stemming from a 2002 state case. That case involved one of Kelly’s victims who met with Kelly and her parents for a meeting after reports began to circulate that there was a video of Kelly and Jane engaging in sexual acts. At that meeting, according to Jane, Kelly admitted he was having a sexual relationship with Jane.
The victim and her father received subpoenas to testify before a grand jury in 2002, where Jane denied having a sexual relationship with Kelly and appearing in his child pornography videos. Before the jury in this year’s case, Jane testified that in 2002, Kelly had a conversation with Jane about “loyalty” and “denying” the relationship as well as the sex tape.
In 2008, Kelly was acquitted of child pornography charges in Chicago because Jane, the victim shown in the video tapes, denied that it was her.
Jane met R. Kelly when she was only 13. At some point, Kelly became Jane’s godfather, so her parents felt comfortable letting her spend the night, and even the weekend, at his home without supervision. She was 14 when she and Kelly began a sexual relationship. Jane, who is now 37, testified that she and Kelly had sex “hundreds” of times before she turned 18.
Jane decided in 2019 to cooperate with investigators years after she was sexually abused by Kelly. “I no longer wanted to carry his lies,” Jane testified.
Wednesday’s sentence could add years to Kelly’s 30-year prison sentence handed down in Brooklyn last year.
"There was a mixed verdict, but we won more counts than we lost," Jennifer Bonjean, Kelly’s lawyer, said outside court following the verdict. "If this jury concluded that he was guilty on the first three counts, would they care enough to consider the evidence on the rest? And they demonstrated that they did. They did their job. They looked at each count separately."
Kelly was placed on suicide watch at the Metropolitan Detention Center in July after he was sentenced to 30 years in prison. His lawyer, Bonjean, argued that the singer was not suicidal and that he was placed on watch only as a “punishment” by the guard in the prison. She said the detention center is run like a “gulag” and that when she and her associates called the prison to learn of Kelly’s status, the guards hung up on them multiple times and “laughed and were highly unprofessional.” Kelly’s legal team filed a lawsuit and was removed from suicide watch in the prison as a result.