R. Kelly Paid For Lost Sextapes – R. Kelly began paying thousands of dollars in 2001 to recover videotapes of himself having sex with teenage girls, federal prosecutors said.
Nearly two decades later, Kelly, 52, is facing two separate federal grand jury indictments in Illinois and New York. The indictments released Friday allege Kelly recruited women for sex, persuaded people to conceal that he had sexual contact with teenage girls and spent hundreds of thousands of dollars buying back the missing videotapes.
Kelly was arrested in Chicago Thursday night and is expected to remain in custody at least until Tuesday.
He briefly appeared in a Chicago federal court Friday, wearing an orange prison jumpsuit. US Magistrate Judge Sheila Finnegan delayed a decision on whether Kelly should be taken to New York and face charges there until he is arraigned in Chicago.
Following the hearing, Kelly’s attorney Steve Greenberg said his client should get bail on the charges he faces out of Illinois and New York.
“He’s certainly not a flight risk, he’s not a danger to anybody at all,” Greenberg told reporters outside the courtroom.
Kelly paid thousands of dollars to recover sex tapes, prosecutors say
A 13-count indictment released Friday in the Northern District of Illinois accused Kelly of videotaping himself having sex with at least four girls under the age of 18 beginning in 1998.
A few years later, after Kelly learned that some of those videos were missing from his “collection,” he and others began paying “hundreds of thousands of dollars” to several people to recover them, the indictment says.
When they recovered the videos, the indictment states that Kelly and his associates directed people to take polygraph tests to ensure they had returned all copies of the videotapes.
Prosecutors allege Kelly and his former business manager, Derrel McDavid, facilitated a trip abroad in 2002 for a girl and her parents to make them unavailable to law enforcement. They also gave them gifts, including a GMC Yukon Denali SUV, and money for over a decade to lie to investigators and conceal the girl’s sexual relationship with Kelly, the indictment said.
In the Illinois indictment, Kelly is charged with one count of conspiracy to receive child pornography, two counts of receiving child pornography, four counts of producing child pornography, five counts of enticement of a minor to engage in criminal sexual activity, and one count of conspiracy to obstruct justice.
A separate five-count indictment in the Eastern District of New York accused Kelly of sexual exploitation of a child, kidnapping, forced labor and violations of the Mann Act involving the coercion and transportation of women and girls in interstate commerce to engage in illegal sexual activity from 1999 to the present.
“R. Kelly’s Enterprise was not only engaged in music; as alleged, for two decades the enterprise at the direction of R. Kelly preyed upon young women and teenagers whose dreams of meeting a superstar, soon turned into a nightmare of rape, child pornography and forced labor.
The musician turned predator allegedly used his stardom to coax some victims into nefarious sex acts while certain members of his enterprise calculatingly facilitated the aberrant conduct,” Homeland Security Special Agent-in-Charge Angel Melendez said in a statement.
Kelly has vehemently denied allegations of sexual misconduct in the past.
The accusations in the New York indictment detail alleged incidents in four states: Illinois, Connecticut, California and New York. There are five Jane Does referenced throughout, including three minors. Kelly is the only defendant in the indictment filed July 10.
The indictment also alleges he exposed at least one individual to a sexually transmitted disease without disclosing it. Continue reading
