Kelly & cellie
Cellmate dug R. Kelly tune, now trial looms
R. Kelly, once the superstar “King of R&B,” was reduced to singing for an audience of one.
For the time it took to sing a song, Kelly transformed the hellish surroundings of Brooklyn’s Metropolitan Detention Center for his cellmate, Brendan Hunt, with a capella performances.
They deeply impressed Hunt, a former state court employee convicted of threatening to kill members of Congress.
“It was like he wasn’t even in prison when Kelly sang,” said Jan Rostal, Hunt’s public defender.
“Brendan felt really lucky to be in the presence of what he thought was just one of the greatest talents of our generation.”
Now it’s time for Robert Sylvester Kelly, 54, to face the music. Kelly’s sex trafficking trial in Brooklyn Federal Court gets underway Wednesday, and a parade of alleged victims will take the stand against the man they say abused them.
The allegations date to the 1990s, when Kelly was a rising Chicago star.
The first charge is that Kelly and his crew bribed an Illinois state employee to create a fake ID for then-15-year-old up-and-coming singer Aaliyah so that the two could be married, according to the indictment, which refers to Aaliyah only as Jane Doe No. 1. Kelly was in his late 20s at the time.
Kelly’s former tour manager, Demetrius Smith, is expected to testify about the fraudulent document at the trial, and how he paid $500 to get it made.
“I took Aaliyah into the office where she took a photo ID stating her name, birth date and a year that showed that she was 18,” Smith wrote in his memoir. “I was angry at myself and disgusted with R. Kelly.”
From there, Brooklyn federal prosecutors will attempt to prove racketeering charges related to six different anonymous Jane Doe victims.
On top of that, the feds recently introduced to the case two male victims whom Kelly is accused of sexually abusing, including one who was underage at the time. Kelly also forced them to have sex with his female victims, prosecutors said.
To win a conviction on the racketeering charges, prosecutors will have to show Kelly’s managers, bodyguards and others helped him engage in illegal sexual activity with women and girls, including producing child pornography.
Kelly has surrounded himself with a motley crew of lawyers whose feuding and conflicts of interest have been the focus of numerous hearings in front of a sometimes exasperated Brooklyn Federal Judge Judge Ann Donnelly.
Kelly dismissed two of his longtime attorneys, Michael Leonard and Steve Greenberg, after they accused the “Sex Me” singer’s other attorneys of being incompetent and “f——-g over” Kelly.
Greenberg, who is vacationing in Hawaii, said he’d rather be in Brooklyn winning Kelly’s case.
“Kelly wasn’t ever forcing anyone to do anything,” Greenberg told the Daily News. He called the claims against the singer “revisionist history” fueled by the #MeToo movement.
One of Kelly’s remaining lawyers, Nicole Blank Becker, was the focus of a hearing on a conflict of interest based on her relationship in 2019 with one of Kelly’s alleged victims. Donnelly determined the conflict was not so serious that she had to take Becker off the case.
Another Kelly lawyer, Thomas Farinella, was suspended from practicing law in New York in 2011 after he allegedly committed a series of infractions, including “improper charges to a client’s credit card ... neglect of numerous client matters, and failure to carry out contracts of employment and to return unearned fees.” He was reinstated in 2013.
After his Brooklyn trial, Kelly will face another trial in Chicago Federal Court on charges of producing and receiving child pornography dating to 1996.
Kelly’s Brooklyn case is the first big trial in the city since the COVID-19 pandemic hit.
COVID-19 social-distancing rules will be in effect. The jury — its members are anonymous — will be spread out in the courtroom gallery. Reporters and other spectators will be allowed to watch the trial on video monitors in “overflow rooms,” Donnelly has ruled.
The trial is slated to go at least four weeks.