A federal court in Illinois has sentenced R Kelly to 20 years in prison for child sex crimes, Variety reports.
Kelly was hit with 13 child sex crimes charges in 2019. In September 2022, a jury found him guilty of six charges, including three counts of coercing minors into sexual activity and three counts of producing sex tapes involving a minor. Those videos included Kelly abusing his then-14-year-old goddaughter. He was acquitted of conspiring to obstruct prior investigations into his abuse of his goddaughter, as well as two other counts of enticing a minor.
Kelly is already serving a 30-year sentence in prison for sex trafficking crimes in a separate federal case. Prosecutors in the child pornography case asked for the artist to serve his latest sentence after the 30 years were up, but the judge ruled that Kelly would serve all but one year of both sentences concurrently — meaning Kelly will ultimately spend 31 years in prison.
The sentence is the latest in a years-long series of trials against Kelly. Earlier this year, state-level sex crime charges against the disgraced singer were dismissed in light of his 30-year prison sentence because the state of Illinois had “limited resources” available to help other victims of abuse. Kelly still faces state sex crime charges in Minnesota.
In November, Kelly’s manager, Donnell Russell, was sentenced to 20 months in prison for stalking and harassing one of the singer’s victims in an attempt to prevent her from speaking out against the artist.
