Trapped in a cell
R. KELLY ORDERED HELD WITHOUT BAIL
After allegedly locking up victims ordered to call him “Daddy,” R. Kelly was ordered held without bail during his first appearance in Brooklyn Federal Court Friday.
Looking tired and puffy in his blue-and-orange jail uniform, Kelly said little during the packed hearing as he pleaded not guilty to his fivecount sex trafficking indictment through his lawyer.
The creepy crooner turned twice to scan the courtroom and smile at co-girlfriends and alleged sex slaves Jocelyn Savage and Azriel Clary, who traveled to New York from Chicago in a show of support.
In the superseding indictment filed July 10, a Brooklyn grand jury said ample evidence exists to try Kelly, 52, on charges he ran a racketeering enterprise for two decades. The operation allegedly exploited children, transported girls and women over state lines for sex and engaged in coercion, kidnapping and forced labor.
Prosecutors claim the raunchy R&B singer, who’s long been dogged by allegations of sexual misconduct but was acquitted in 2008 on child porn charges in Chicago, has been a serial sex predator since at least 1999.
The indictment involves five Jane Doe victims — three of them minors at the time of their alleged abuse.
Prosecutors claim Kelly — whose real name is Robert Kelly — locked some of the alleged victims in rooms with no access to food or water, used them to create child pornography, forced them to wear baggy clothing in public, hid the fact he had a sexually transmitted disease and told them to call him “Daddy.”
If convicted on all counts, Kelly faces the possibility of decades in prison.
“They’re not minor charges,” U.S. Magistrate Judge Steven Tiscione said Friday as he denied Kelly’s bail request and deemed him both a flight risk and danger to the public. “He has significant incentive to flee given the long prison term.”
The judge also acknowledged a different federal judge in Chicago previously ruled Kelly should remain locked up ahead of trial on a separate indictment filed in the Windy City last month.
“Even if I released him on bail in this case, he’s not going anywhere,” Tiscione said.
In recent letters to the court, Kelly’s lawyer Douglas Anton slammed the Jane Does
as “disgruntled groupies” who shouldn’t be allowed to remain anonymous.
“There is no reason that the identity of all of these, now adult, alleged victims should not be made public so that the defense can prepare a proper defense,” Anton wrote in one letter late Thursday.
“The government alleges that Jane Does #1-5 traveled on planes, drove in cars, stayed at hotels, etc. … of their own free will … all pretty public and adult type activities, and all to see their musical hero, but now paints them as needing of anonymity. It shouldn’t be both ways,” he argued.
In his separate 13-count federal indictment in Chicago, Kelly is accused of working with cohorts to fix his 2008 child pornography trial by bribing and intimidating witnesses and victims.
The Chicago indictment also alleges Kelly, who has pleaded not guilty in the case, paid big bucks to recover child sex tapes before they fell into the hands of prosecutors.
The “I Believe I Can Fly” singer faces further state charges in Cook County alleging he sexually abused four victims, three of them underage at the time.
Speaking in Brooklyn Friday, prosecutors said the New York case has no overlap with the federal case in Chicago and shares only one alleged victim with the pending state case in Chicago.
The total number of alleged victims in all three criminal cases stands at 13, they said.
One of the five Jane Does in the Brooklyn indictment appears to be Faith Rodgers, a Texas woman represented by Gloria Allred who previously went public with her allegations.
Rodgers, 22, sued Kelly in Manhattan last year claiming he forced her to have “nonpermissive, painful and abusive sex” in a New York hotel in 2017 and knowingly infected her with herpes.
She further claims Kelly manipulated her into a yearlong relationship during which he routinely locked her up in rooms and vehicles as “punishment” for “failing to please” him.
Allred attended the hearing in Brooklyn on Friday and said she represents a “majority” of the victims in the case.
“Mr. Kelly took advantage of his position as a wealthy, powerful, famous celebrity to prey on vulnerable minors, who admired and trusted him,” she said, blasting Anton for calling the women “groupies.”
“I feel that it is wrong and completely inappropriate to victim-blame and insult them in a court of law,” she said.
At an afternoon status conference, U.S. District Court Judge Ann Donnelly said the Brooklyn case would return Oct. 2, but Kelly, who’s heading back to Chicago still in custody, won’t have to appear in person.
Asked by Donnelly where Kelly is expected to face the music first — New York or Illinois — the Grammy winner’s lawyer said it isn’t clear.
“They’ve all told me they’re gonna go first,” lawyer Steven Greenberg said, adding that Kelly planned to appeal his denial of bail.
Allegations of Kelly’s pervy penchants date back to his brief 1994 marriage to the late singer Aaliyah, who was 15 at the time while he was 27.
In 2002, Chicago SunTimes reporter Jim DeRogatis received a 26-minute video from an unidentified source that allegedly showed Kelly having sex with a 14-year-old girl and urinating in her mouth.
Kelly was indicted on more than a dozen counts of child porn related to the recording, but jurors declined to convict after the girl didn’t testify.
In 2017, DeRogatis wrote a bombshell article for Buzzfeed in which alleged victims stepped forward to say Kelly brainwashed them into joining a twisted sex “cult.”
A six-party documentary series called “Surviving R. Kelly” aired on Lifetime in January, and its disturbing portrayal of the prior accusations combined with new interviews ignited a firestorm of public outrage.
Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx made a public appeal for victims to come forward, and Kelly was arrested on the first wave of state charges in February.