20 YEARS FOR KID PORN KELLY
New sentence won’t add much to 30 he’s already serving
R. Kelly was sentenced Thursday in Chicago to 20 years in prison after being convicted of child pornography and enticement of minors for sex, but the R&B singer dodged much more actual time behind bars.
He’ll serve 19 of those years at the same time as the 30-year sentence he received last year after a trial in New York, U.S. District Judge Harry Leinenweber said.
Prosecutors had called for the federal judge to give Kelly a 25-year penalty that wouldn’t begin until his first sentence ended. Kelly’s defense team pushed for the singer to receive a 10-year penalty to be served completely concurrently.
Thursday’s sentencing relates to the 56-year-old Kelly’s conviction last September on three counts of child pornography and three counts of enticement of minors for sex. He was found guilty on those counts after a month-long trial in Chicago, during which four accusers testified.
The Chicago-born Kelly, whose full name is Robert Kelly, wasn’t convicted last year of an obstruction of justice charge that accused him of rigging his 2008 child pornography trial, which ended in his acquittal.
The 2008 trial largely centered on a video that prosecutors claimed shows Kelly, then around 30, abusing a 14-year-old girl, who didn’t testify at the time.
The accuser, now in her 30s, testified last year under the pseudonym Jane and claimed to be the girl in the video. Four of the charges that Kelly was convicted of related to Jane.
“I have lost my dreams to Robert Kelly. I will never get back what I lost to Robert
Kelly. … I have been permanently scarred by Robert,” Jane said in a statement read during Thursday’s sentencing hearing.
“When your virginity is taken by a pedophile at 14 … your life is never your own.”
Prosecutors hoped a new sentence tacked onto Kelly’s first would function as a life penalty for the Grammy winner.
“The only way to ensure Kelly does not reoffend is to impose a sentence that will keep him in prison for the rest of his life,” they contended in a 37-page court filing last week.
Before announcing the sentence, Leinenweber disagreed with the prosecutors’ claim Kelly used fear to prey on underage girls.
“The [government’s] whole theory of grooming, was sort of the opposite of fear of bodily harm,” Leinenweber said toward the beginning of the sentencing hearing. “It was the fear of lost love, lost affections [from Kelly]’. … It just doesn’t seem to me that it rises to the fear of bodily harm.”
Kelly confirmed at the beginning of Thursday’s proceedings that he’d looked over documents in the case.
“Your Honor, I have gone over it with my attorney,” Kelly said. “I’m just relying on my attorney for that.”
Last year’s Chicago trial ended less than three months after Kelly was sentenced to 30 years after being found guilty in New York of racketeering and sex trafficking.
Kelly, whose hits include “I Believe I Can Fly” and “Ignition,” has long denied accusations of sexual misconduct involving minors. The allegations received renewed attention with the release of the 2019 documentary “Surviving R. Kelly,” which featured accusers sharing their accounts.