R. Kelly has been accused of more terrible sex crimes. According to the Associated Press, federal prosecutors working on the disgraced singer’s sex trafficking case have submitted more than a dozen previously unheard allegations, including a claim that Kelly had “sexual contact” with an underage boy.
On Friday, prosecutors filed a wide-ranging collection of additional allegations in court in hopes that jurors in his upcoming trial — who have not yet been chosen, as a New York federal court will begin its jury selection on August 9th — will hear the claims. It’s worth noting that these allegations are not formal charges against R. Kelly, and therefore the court will not be determining if he’s guilty or innocent regarding these new allegations. Instead, they’re meant to help show that the actual charges “were not isolated events and were part of a larger pattern,” said prosecutors.
The new allegations concern more than a dozen different people who the government claims were sexually abused, physically abused, threatened, or otherwise mistreated by Kelly. One of those people was a 17-year-old boy and aspiring musician who met Kelly at a McDonald’s in December 2006. Kelly allegedly invited the boy to his Chicago studio and asked him “what he would do to make it in the music business.” According to the prosecutors’ court filing, Kelly then propositioned and had sexual contact with the boy while he was still underage.
In 2008, when Kelly was preparing to go on trial for child pornography charges in Chicago, that same boy allegedly told the singer he had access to a juror. Kelly allegedly asked him to contact the juror and “vouch he was a ‘good guy,'” but it’s uncertain if the boy actually followed the singer’s orders. Kelly was later acquitted in that case.
This same 17-year-old boy allegedly introduced Kelly to a different male friend that was 16 or 17 years old at the time. Kelly began a sexual relationship with that second boy several years later, said prosecutors, and he filmed the two teenagers “in sexual encounters with other people,” including a few of Kelly’s girlfriends.
This is the latest in a nonstop flood of allegations against R. Kelly. The singer is facing federal indictments in both New York and Illinois, as well as state charges in Illinois and Minnesota. Earlier this year, a former associate of Kelly’s pleaded guilty of attempting to bribe a witness to not testify against the imprisoned sex abuser.
Late last year, a Latin Kings gang member named Jeremiah Shane Farmer attacked Kelly with a pen and stomped on his head repeatedly. The inmate was reportedly upset over recent lockdowns at the detention center stemming from large Kelly protests outside the building.
