R. Kelly Charged After Alleged Video Evidence of Singer Assaulting Underage Girl
February 22, 2019 1:36
R. Kelly was charged Friday with 10 counts of aggravated criminal sexual abuse on Friday morning in Cook County, Illinois.
The Chicago Sun-Times confirmed the charges and reported that prosecutors sought an arrest warrant on Friday afternoon.
The R&B superstar has faced nearly two decades of accusations of sexual abuse. And last Thursday, Cook County prosecutors reportedly received a 45-minute videotape that is said to show Kelly performing multiple sex acts with an underage girl, whom both Kelly and the girl describe on tape as being 14 years old.
Celebrity lawyer Michael Avenatti said he turned over the tape to the Cook County State’s Attorney Office. “My client knows the identity of the girl and R. Kelly. He identified the two of them on the videotape,” Avenatti told CNN last week. “He worked for and has known R. Kelly for decades and he met the girl on a number of occasions.”
Moments before the Friday charges were announced, Avenatti ominously tweeted: ‘It’s over.’
The music superstar has repeatedly denied all accusations against him.
“[Kelly] never knowingly had sex with an underage woman, he never force anyone to do anything, he never held anyone captive, he never abuse anyone,” his lawyer, Steve Greenberg, told The Associated Press last month.
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Kelly, 52, has been accused by young, mostly black women of physically, mentally, and sexually abusing them.
In 2017, BuzzFeed published a report detailing the singer’s influence over these young women who were held involuntarily in what some called “a cult.” The report, cultivated from interviewed of three sets of parents, details how Kelly allegedly imprisoned these women in his Atlanta and Chicago residences and subjected them to physical, verbal, and sexual abuse.
Earlier this year, Lifetime aired a six-hour docu-series, Surviving R. Kelly, that quoted several of his alleged victims. “He told me to perform sexual acts while his friends were in the backseat. It was like he owned me,” Lizzette Martinez said. “He stole my life from me.”
In 2002, Kelly was indicted on 21 counts of child pornography in Illinois over another video made in the late 1990s allegedly showing him engaged in sex acts with a 13-year-old girl. Prosecutors and 15 witnesses, at the time claimed that the tape showed Kelly having sex with the niece of one of the singer’s protégée, R&B singer Sparkle (the girl and her parents did not testify).
After less than day of deliberations, a jury acquitted him on all counts.
Kelly’s first court date is scheduled for March 8.
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