“Surviving R. Kelly Part III: The Final Chapter” is a two-part look at the legal fallout Kelly has faced.
R. Kelly
R. Kelly’s onetime manager was sentenced Monday to a year in federal prison for calling in a shooting threat that halted a screening of a damning documentary about the R&B star.
Kelly’s attorneys on Tuesday filed the routine post-conviction motions asking a judge to either toss out the singer’s six convictions or grant him another trial, arguing prosecutors failed to prove their case and allowed a witness to provide false testimony.
Derrel McDavid on Monday filed an 18-page motion through his attorneys seeking a court order that would grant him the fees following what his attorneys called a “vexatious, frivolous, and bad faith” prosecution.
For survivors of sexual assault and their advocates, it has been a long road as a federal jury yesterday convicted singer R. Kelly of six counts of producing child pornography and enticing girls for sex. The conviction comes more than two decades after the crimes took place.
During the monthlong trial, jurors heard from R. Kelly’s goddaughter “Jane” and three other accusers — each of whom testified using a pseudonym — who described being sexually abused at the hands of the singer while they were underage.
Jury deliberations got underway Tuesday afternoon
“You can think he’s the most amoral, unethical person on the planet,” R. Kelly’s attorney Jennifer Bonjean said, “and that has nothing to do with whether the government has met its burden on the charged offenses.”
Attorneys for both the prosecution and defense prepared to deliver their final statements to jurors in the trial of R. Kelly and his former employees, Derrel McDavid and June Brown.
Derrel McDavid, who worked for Kelly for more than two decades, spent Friday morning back on the witness stand at the Dirksen Federal Building under cross examination during his third-straight day of testimony.
Derrel McDavid testified he didn’t believe early allegations that the R&B singer had sexually abused minors in the 1990s, stating he thought such claims were not only false, but were the “cost of doing business” in the entertainment industry.
Music critic Jim DeRogatis and his employer, The New Yorker, filed a motion asking U.S. District Judge Harry Leinenweber to quash a subpoena filed by Kelly’s co-defendant Derrel McDavid, citing it as “unduly burdensome, unreasonable and oppressive.”
Kelly told U.S. District Judge Harry Leinenweber on Thursday that he would not be testifying in his own defense at his second federal trial in as many years. One of his codefendants, however, is planning to take the witness stand.
Among the last prosecution witnesses was a 42-year-old woman who went by the pseudonym “Nia.” She was the fourth accuser to testify against the Grammy Award-winning singer at the trial in Kelly’s hometown.
A second alleged victim who claimed R. Kelly sexually abused her while she was a minor in the 1990s, told jurors Monday that she lied during an investigation into the R&B superstar’s past child pornography allegations to conceal her own involvement with him.
Prosecution witness Lisa Van Allen said she rummaged through a gym bag full of recordings of Kelly having sex with women and girls on a rare occasion when Kelly left it unattended at a studio one day in 2000.
Defense lawyers at R. Kelly’s child pornography trial in Chicago sought Wednesday to portray a key government witness as a liar and extortionist, contending the man first approached the R&B star in 2001 and demanded that Kelly pay $1 million or he’d go public with video that could put Kelly in serious legal peril.
