NY jury hears more from alleged R. Kelly victims
Ex-employees also testify as feds try to bolster RICO case
The first time R. Kelly allegedly struck “Jane,” they were sitting in Lincoln Park on Chicago’s North Side as the summer of 2015 was drawing to a close.
Over the previous months, she had been pulled fully into the superstar singer’s orbit. He arranged for her to follow him around the country, put her up in fancy hotels or had her stay in the master bedroom off his Ohio Street studio, Jane testified in court this week under a pseudonym.
They’d had sex nearly every day as he video recorded the encounters. But one day, as they ate Al’s Beef hot dogs in the park, she decided it was time to come clean: She was only 17.
“I was very scared,” Jane testified at the singer’s racketeering trial in Brooklyn on Monday. “And when I told him, he slapped me in my face with an open palm and then he walked away.”
It would not be the last time. Over the next five years, she testified, he punched her, beat her with his size-12 Nike shoe and spanked her so hard it broke her skin. She had to ask Kelly permission to use the bathroom, and when he did not give it, she would have to urinate in cups.
Jane’s testimony, which stretched over three days in the second week of Kelly’s trial, was a key part of what’s now been a string of accusations by alleged victims that have painted the singer as a domineering and sometimes violent sociopath.
But perhaps even more crucial to the racketeering charge at the heart of the case, Jane and other witnesses in recent days have testified at length about the ways in which people in Kelly’s orbit drew them in and subjected them to his bizarre “rules.”
In order to win a conviction on the main RICO count, prosecutors need to prove that Kelly was the head of a criminal enterprise bent on satisfying his illegal sexual appetites, not just a boor who occasionally mistreated girls and young women he met on tour.
Kelly’s defense, meanwhile, has asserted that there is no convincing evidence of a sophisticated, ongoing enterprise and said the singer’s accusers are lying — motivated by spite or greed or both.
To bolster prosecutors’ claims, the jury of seven men and five women has now heard from several members of Kelly’s expansive entourage, including a onetime tour manager who testified about paying a bribe to facilitate Kelly’s illegal 1994 marriage to 15-year-old singer Aaliyah and an ex-runner who said he helped chauffeur the singer’s many “girlfriends” to and from Kelly’s Olympia Fields mansion, a place he described as “almost like the Twilight Zone.”
On Thursday, Kelly’s longtime studio manager testified about Kelly’s bizarre system of fining employees for even the most minor of infractions, from forgetting to bring him lunch to eating his doughnuts without permission, according to reporting by the New York Daily News.
Tom Arnold, who met the singer in 1998 and served as a manager from 2004 to 2011, told the jury he finally quit after Kelly docked him a full week’s salary for booking a male tour guide at Disney World, the Daily News report stated.
“It needed to be a woman,”
Arnold testified, adding that Kelly cut him a check for $0. “My wife wasn’t happy. I wasn’t happy. Rob wasn’t happy.”
The three alleged victims who have testified, meanwhile, have all said Kelly struck up relationships with them when they were underage and vulnerable, the Daily News reported.
The final witness of the week, who testified under her first name, Stephanie, told jurors she first saw Kelly in 1998 at the Rock ’n’ Roll McDonalds in Chicago when she was on a double date with her boyfriend.
Kelly had an associate deliver his phone number to her, she said. She was just 16 years old.
She didn’t call him back then but ran into Kelly again a year later when he was signing autographs at a Nike store near the hotel where she was working, Stephanie testified. She asked if he would help her friend pursue a career in the music industry — an introduction that quickly led into an abusive six-month relationship, Stephanie said, the Daily News reported on the testimony.
Kelly would have sex with the 17-year-old six to eight times per month, forcing her to perform humiliating sex acts that she did not want to do and often filming the encounters, she said.
“He would tell me to get
undressed then he would position my body,” Stephanie, now 39, recalled.
Kelly would then leave the room and tell her to be in the exact same position when he returned, which sometimes wasn’t for hours, she said, according to the Daily News reporting.
“I did as he asked because I felt like I didn’t have a choice,” Stephanie testified.
But it was Jane’s testimony that dominated the week in court. She told the jury she was a junior in high school aspiring to be a professional singer when she met Kelly in 2015.
A member of his entourage slipped her Kelly’s phone number at a concert in Orlando and said, “Don’t tell anyone.”
She testified she was not interested in Kelly romantically but wanted his critique of her musical abilities. So they set up a time for her to sing for him at a hotel in Orlando, she said.
He would not let her sing until she let him perform a sex act on her, she testified. After that, she would fly out to wherever he was on tour, eventually spending much of the summer with him, she said.
An assistant, Cheryl Mack, would arrange Jane’s travel after Jane texted her to say “Mr. Kelly said to get me to whatever city that he was in at that time.” Jane also gave Mack her real birth date, she
testified.
Mack also at least once made sure Jane stayed in her designated hotel room when she did not have Kelly’s permission to leave, she testified.
And after Jane told Kelly her true age that day in Lincoln Park, Kelly consulted with a cadre of attorneys about how to handle the matter, she said. They advised him to make sure Jane could be homeschooled while she lived in Chicago with Kelly, she said.
They also continued to have sexual contact after she told him she was underage, she said.
On cross-examination Wednesday, Kelly’s attorneys confronted the witness with letters she’d purportedly written to Kelly that the defense argues show Jane was lying about the mistreatment and that she and her parents were scheming to take advantage of Kelly’s fame.
Under questioning by defense attorney Deveraux Cannick, she read aloud for the jury parts of the one letter that stated if Kelly tried to break up with her, “I’m going to tell everyone you raped me. … I’m going to say you raped me since I was a minor.”
Her notes to him also warned that “she would spank herself really hard” — hard enough to leave bruises — so she could accuse him of beating her.
But Jane insisted the abuse was real and that the writings were a ploy engineered by Kelly “to protect him in a trial like this from very serious charges.”
Assistant U.S. Attorney Elizabeth Geddes responded by giving a point-by-point rundown of her testimony — including allegations that he intentionally isolated and demeaned her with perverted “punishments.” She then asked the witness whether the blame fell “on your parents or the defendant?”
She responded: “The defendant.”
Another “girlfriend” of Kelly’s, whom witnesses have identified with the nickname Juice, was so strict about enforcing the rules that Jane once complained she acted like a police officer, Jane testified.
Juice also reviewed all the letters Kelly’s girlfriends had to write, in which they falsely confessed to stealing or said their family members abused them, she said.
“He said that these were basically letters that would never see the day of light and that they were to basically exploit us to protect him,” Jane testified.
After his girlfriends wrote the letters, Juice would review them to make sure they weren’t too similar to each other and make sure the signatures matched those on their driver’s licenses, Jane testified.
Stephanie, meanwhile, whose testimony Thursday ended the week of trial, said that during their abusive six-month relationship Kelly once compared himself to musician Jerry Lee Lewis — who notoriously married his 13-year-old cousin.
It was during a 1999 meal at Houston’s restaurant in Chicago, where Kelly and Stephanie were dining with the hip-hop duo Boo & Gotti. Kelly, without being prompted, “mentioned that he likes young girls,” she told the jury.
“‘Even look at Jerry Lee Lewis — he’s a genius and I’m a genius,’ ”she remembered Kelly saying.
He added, “‘We should be allowed to do whatever we want. Look at what we give to the world.’ “