R&B Singer R. Kelly has been found guilty by a government jury in New York of racketeering, including act of robbery and sexual exploitation of a child, alongside isolated charges of sex trafficking.
In this government case in the Eastern District of New York, Kelly faced an aggregate of nine counts – one count of racketeering, with 14 basic acts that included sexual exploitation of a child, kidnapping, bribery and sex trafficking charges, and also eight additional counts of violations of the Mann Act, a sex trafficking law.
Of the 14 acts for the racketeering count, he had to be found guilty for no less than two to be sentenced for that count. Hearers found investigators had proven all except two of the 14 underlying racketeering acts.
In the September 28th guilty decision, it labelled R. Kelly as a predator who used his fame and fortune to go after the young, the powerless and the voiceless for his own sexual satisfaction – as per the US lawyer from the Eastern District of New York.
As per Kasulis- – the acting US Attorney, R. Kelly is a ‘hunter’ who used his internal circle to catch underage young girls and people for quite a long time, in an ignoble trap of sex misuse, abuse and embarrassment.
Speaking about the dauntlessness of the victims for boldly coming out to share their stories, Kasulis said their voices have at long last been heard and equity has been served.
R. Kelly enrolled powerless underage young ladies with the end goal of physically manhandling them. These were not May-October connections, which is what his defense lawyer wanted the jury to accept – however were violations against children and a few grown-ups.
Kelly didn’t have any response to the verdict when it was read in court and, as per his lawyer, he was not anticipating this decision.
According to the jury, which was comprised of seven men and five women, after looking into the case on Friday September 24, Kelly could face decades in jail at sentencing, which is booked for May 4.
The decision comes 13 years after Kelly, was absolved of child pornography charges at an Illinois state preliminary.
A lawyer for Kelly said they are thinking about documenting an appeal and are disillusioned in the decision.
How It All Began
The 13-count indictment released in July 2019 in the Northern District of Illinois accused Kelly of videotaping himself having sex with at least four girls younger than 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.
Also in 2019, a grand jury in Cook County, Illinois, indicted Kelly on 10 counts of aggravated criminal sexual abuse involving four alleged victims, three of whom were listed as younger than 17.
That indictment was followed a few months later by another one from a Cook County grand jury on 11 counts ranging from aggravated criminal sexual assault and criminal sexual assault to aggravated criminal sexual abuse.
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In August 2019, the Hennepin County Attorney’s Office in Minnesota announced Kelly was charged with two counts of prostitution with a person under 18. According to the criminal complaint, a woman said the incident happened in 2001, when she was 17.
