CHICAGO (CN) — Former R&B star R. Kelly has been found guilty of child pornography charges in the second federal trial the singer has faced since 2021. The trial, held in Chicago's Dirksen Federal Courthouse, lasted a month.
The jury reached its verdict Wednesday afternoon after 11 hours of deliberation. The jurors found Kelly, 55, guilty on six of the 13 child porn, conspiracy, and underage sexual enticement charges federal prosecutors filed against him in 2019.
Of the six charges on which Kelly was found guilty, three were for the production of sex tapes between 1998 and 1999 featuring his goddaughter, a then-14 year old girl going by the pseudonym Jane. The other three guilty counts were for enticing sex with three underage girls: Jane and two other women going by the pseudonyms Nia and Pauline.
Kelly was acquitted on seven other charges, including four conspiracy charges. The jury also acquitted Kelly's co-defendant Derrel McDavid, his former manager, on the same four conspiracy charges. Milton Brown, another co-defendant and Kelly's former personal assistant, was also not found guilty on his single conspiracy charge. Cheers went up in the courtroom as McDavid's and Brown's verdicts were read.
Besides the conspiracy charges, the jury also found Kelly not guilty on two sexual enticement charges related to alleged sexual encounters with two other women called Tracy and Brittany. Tracy's testimony had inconsistencies which came to light during cross-examination, and Brittany never appeared in court at all. Prosecutors said Brittany would testify during their opening statements in August, and never explained her absence.
In a post-trial press conference, Kelly's lead defense attorney Jennifer Bonjean said it was "offensive" that the government charged the singer with sexually enticing a woman the jury never even saw.
"The jury did not accept that you could charge an indictment and not even bring a witness in, that being Brittany," Bonjean said. "Which was really offensive in my view. You're going to charge someone with serious offenses that carry serious time and you don't even think you have to bring that witness in to tell what happened?"
The Brittany controversy aside, Jane was the undisputed center of the trial throughout its month-long proceedings. The videos featuring her began leaking in the early aughts, most famously when one tape was sent to former Chicago Sun-Times reporter Jim DeRogatis in February 2002. Kelly was indicted in Cook County on 21 child porn charges later that year, but he was acquitted of all of them in 2008. At the time, Jane and her parents maintained that it was not her on the tape.
Jane reversed her testimony for this trial. She testified in August that she began a sexual relationship with Kelly at age 14, and that he filmed them engaging in sex acts and threesomes on multiple occasions. U.S. attorneys alleged in their 2019 indictment that Kelly convinced Jane and her parents to lie about the relationship to a Cook County grand jury in 2002, and that he, McDavid and Brown conspired to recover the videos and buy off or intimidate other witnesses all the way through the 2008 Cook County trial.
In August, Kelly's ex-girlfriend Lisa Van Allen even testified that McDavid said he and Kelly should have "merc'd her," meaning killed her, for absconding with an alleged threesome tape featuring herself, Kelly and Jane in 2002.
The 2019 indictment also alleged that Kelly enticed five underage girls, including Jane, for sex between 1996 and 2000. Tracy, Nia and Pauline took the stand in August after Jane testified. They all alleged varying degrees of sexual contact with Kelly before turning 18, ranging from the singer masturbating in front of them to Tracy's testimony that Kelly sexually assaulted her.
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