BROOKLYN (CN) — As federal prosecutors continued presenting their case in R. Kelly’s federal trial, two alleged victims took the stand on Monday — one man and one woman — describing sexual abuse they say took place when they were teenagers. Kelly, 54, is on trial in Brooklyn for racketeering and Mann Act violations stemming from an alleged decades-long sex ring.
Louis met Kelly when he was a 17-year-old senior in high school working at a McDonald’s in Markham, Illinois. He said he had seen the R&B singer’s Maybach roll through the fast food chain before, but this time, the car pulled up so the singer was in line with the ordering window.
Kelly, who was 39 at the time, was interested in Louis’ manager, Valerie, and asked Louis if he could “hook it up.” When Louis obliged, “he looked at me like, ‘oh, you really did that for me?’” Louis recalled on the stand.
The singer gave Louis two pieces of paper: one for Valerie and one to keep for himself.
“I was too nervous to call him myself,” said Louis, an aspiring rapper who wanted to Kelly to help him professionally. So he gave the paper to his mother. “She put it in her Bible and she eventually called.”
Louis visited the basement-level music studio at Kelly’s Olympia Fields, Illinois, mansion, and rapped for one of Kelly’s producers. He kept in touch with a Kelly associate known as “Junebug,” who invited him to watch Kelly and his crew play basketball at the Markham Field House, around the corner from the McDonald’s where Louis worked.
That earned Louis another invitation to Kelly’s studio. But when he arrived, instead of working on his music, he met Kelly in the detached garage where the singer had set up a boxing ring.
“He was just asking me, like, what I was willing to do for music,” Louis recalled. Conversation turned sexual, and the singer asked whether Louis had ever fantasized about men.
Kelly proceeded to take Louis’ pants down and perform oral sex on him, even though “I kept saying no,” Louis testified. “I said I didn’t like it, I wasn’t into it. I wasn’t getting a reaction."
Louis said the singer then sent him home without hitting the studio, saying, “not today, man, something came up.”
Even though he was uncomfortable, Louis continued to see Kelly at basketball and attended parties at his home. “I really wanted to make it in the music industry,” he said. He would also bring high school classmates to Kelly’s home: On the day of his high school graduation, he and friends attended the release party for Kelly’s "Double Up" album.
“My mom took us all to the store to get the CDs,” Louis said.
Sexual encounters with Kelly continued, according to Louis, who described a shocking example that took place in the boxing ring.
“He snapped his fingers two times and a young lady came out from underneath the ring,” Louis said, adding that she was fully naked. “She crawled over to him and gave him oral sex.”
Then Kelly told the woman to “pull my pants down and do me the same way she did him,” Louis said. Kelly told her to call Louis “Daddy” — the same moniker that female victims and Louis testified that Kelly instructed them to use to address him.
In another instance, Louis passed out at a party in a club-themed room called “The Five Star” at Kelly’s home. When he woke up, Kelly was there, and Louis’ pants were unbuttoned, the witness testified.