The R&B star is accused of commanding a criminal enterprise that recruited women and underage girls to have sex with him.
After decades of accusations, R. Kelly’s trial opened Wednesday with the same question that has followed the singer as he rose to stardom and fell to disgrace: Was he using his musical talent to disguise something sinister?
“This case is about a predator,” Maria Cruz Melendez, an assistant U.S. attorney, told the jury during an opening statement in the long-awaited and closely watched federal trial, which is being held in Brooklyn. Mr. Kelly, she said, was a manipulator who “used his fame, his popularity and a network of people at his disposal to target, groom and exploit young girls, boys and women for his own sexual gratification.”
During a roughly one-hour speech to the seven men and five women who will decide Mr. Kelly’s fate, Ms. Cruz Melendez outlined Mr. Kelly’s interactions with six women and girls who she said that he had harmed through a combination of sexual, physical and psychological abuse.
The women include the singer Aaliyah, whose brief marriage to Mr. Kelly at 15 years old was among the first revelations to fuel questions over his conduct. Five other women, who will be referred to only by their first names or by pseudonyms at the trial — Stephanie, Sonia, Jerhonda and Zell, who are all expected to testify, as well as Faith, who is not — were between 16 and 22 when Mr. Kelly preyed upon them, Ms. Cruz Melendez said.
Prosecutors are seeking to convince the jury that Mr. Kelly, 54, and those in his orbit built and perpetuated a decades-long system of sexual abuse. But Mr. Kelly’s defense team, in its opening statement, questioned those claims and challenged the credibility of Mr. Kelly’s accusers.
The singer, whose real name is Robert Sylvester Kelly, has staunchly denied all of the accusations against him.
Nicole Blank Becker, one of Mr. Kelly’s four lawyers, described his accusers as once-enamored fans who each developed an “agenda” when faced with the prospect of media attention and financial gain.
She warned jurors to question their testimony, suggesting that it would be filled with “exaggerations.”
“We believe their testimony will crumble,” Ms. Blank Becker told jurors. “There will be so many untruths told to you, ladies and gentlemen, that even the government won’t be able to untangle the mess of lies.”
Two of the women at the center of the trial appeared in the documentary series “Surviving R. Kelly,” and two have never spoken publicly about their allegations. Three were underage when their encounters with Mr. Kelly began.
That several are expected to testify marks a significant change from Mr. Kelly’s only previous criminal trial, in 2008, when he was acquitted of child pornography charges.
The long-delayed trial has been highly anticipated since Mr. Kelly’s sexual conduct came under fresh scrutiny during the height of the #MeToo movement. It follows several similar high-profile cases over accusations of sexual assault, including the trials of the Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein and the comedian and actor Bill Cosby.
But Mr. Kelly’s trial also stands apart. In Mr. Weinstein’s case, which touched off a national reckoning around sexual abuse, many of the women who came forward were actresses and models, and they were mostly white — as were many of those at the center of accusations in the most prominent cases across business, politics, media and entertainment.
The majority of Mr. Kelly’s accusers are Black women.
“I do think it matters a lot — that this is the first high-profile #MeToo-era trial where the accusers, for the most part, aren’t white women,” said Deborah Tuerkheimer, a professor of law at Northwestern University and former assistant district attorney in Manhattan.
“If you take these kinds of accusers who have traditionally been most dismissed, most disregarded, most cast aside — and those women are able to be believed and have jurors care enough to convict, that matters,” Ms. Tuerkheimer said. “And that would send a powerful message.”
During the trial, jurors will hear testimony from witnesses and evidence that accuses Mr. Kelly of kidnapping, forced labor, failing to disclose his sexually transmitted disease to his sexual partners and producing child pornography.
But the jury that filed into the courtroom just after 10 a.m. on Wednesday will be tasked with processing a much broader question that is central to the case: whether an informal criminal organization existed around and contributed to the crimes Mr. Kelly is accused of.
Minutes before the jury entered the courtroom, U.S. District Judge Ann M. Donnelly, who is presiding over the case, ruled on a slew of motions, allowing prosecutors to offer evidence of sexual abuse dating back to 1991. Those allegations regard Mr. Kelly’s brief marriage to the singer Aaliyah.
During her opening statement, Ms. Cruz Melendez portrayed the 1994 marriage as a last-resort effort by Mr. Kelly to avoid legal prosecution. (The singer, whose real name was Aaliyah Dana Haughton, died in a plane crash in 2001.)
One night in 1994 while he was on tour and about to take the stage, Ms. Cruz Melendez said, one of Mr. Kelly’s associates told him that Aaliyah believed she might have been pregnant.
“This was, of course, a huge problem for him,” Ms. Cruz Melendez said. “If she was pregnant that meant there would be questions: At the very top of that list of questions — who is the father of that baby?”
He and his associates flew to Chicago to meet Aaliyah late one night, she said, and “got to work.” He bribed a government employee in Illinois to obtain a fake ID for her, and in a hotel suite, he married her, Ms. Cruz Melendez said.
Then, she said, he caught a flight and returned to finish his tour.
The judge also ruled Wednesday that the jury would hear the details of settlement agreements regarding accusations that Mr. Kelly knowingly gave two women herpes in 2001, as well as evidence that he gave the sexually transmitted disease to a minor in 1995.
Another young singer, identified in court as Zell, met Mr. Kelly at one of his concerts when she was 17, Ms. Cruz Melendez said; Mr. Kelly was 48 at the time. Throughout the concert, he paid extra attention to her, singing some of his songs directly to her.
Zell was already a serious singer, performing in a choir and getting paid for gigs. She thought Mr. Kelly could help her career, Ms. Cruz Melendez said, so when his assistant gave her his number, she called him.
He told her to swing by the hotel where he was staying. In a van outside, he instructed her to sit on his lap and give him a kiss, and then he invited her up to his hotel room, Ms. Cruz Melendez said.
She agreed to meet him there, hoping to sing for him. But before she could sing, the prosecutor recounted, he said “he needed to relieve himself.” Zell knew he meant sexually.
He begged to have sex with her, eventually saying that if she agreed, he would take care of her for the rest of her life. After much persuasion, she submitted. And, the prosecutor said, “Eventually, she got to sing for the defendant.”
Mr. Kelly, prosecutors said, promised her parents that he could help push her career, even “telling her she’d be the next Aaliyah.”
Instead, Zell contracted herpes from the singer, the prosecutor said.
By the time she was a senior in high school, Zell, who had at first lied about her age, told Mr. Kelly that she was just 17.
“Did he end it? No,” the prosecutor told the jury. “He suggested that she do her senior year remotely and live with him.”
Mr. Kelly soon became psychologically abusive, Ms. Cruz Melendez said. He told Zell to call him “Daddy” and prohibited her from doing even small tasks without his authorization. When she disobeyed, he violently beat her, calling them “chastisements,” which for a period of time he doled out on a daily basis.
Sometimes, when she failed to obey him, the singer forced her to have sex with a man she had never met; other times, he locked her in a room for days.
The prosecutor also described physical and psychological violence that she said the accusers suffered at the hands of Mr. Kelly, who on multiple occasions made it clear to the young women that he did not care if they were underage.
When Jerhonda, then 16, showed the singer her ID, “He shrugged it off,” the prosecutor said. “He asked her, ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’”
In one instance, Mr. Kelly ushered Faith, then 19, into a small room and ordered her to strip, Ms. Cruz Melendez said. She spotted a gun in the room, and complied when Mr. Kelly ordered her to perform a sex act on him. Later, when she filed a lawsuit against the singer, his staff threatened to release compromising photos of her.
Outside the courthouse on Wednesday morning, fans of Mr. Kelly had scribbled messages of support, like “Free R. Kelly” and “Honey Love,” the name of one of his songs while he was in the R&B group Public Service Announcement.
The trial may not be the final chapter in the decades-long trail of murmurs and accusations of criminal behavior by Mr. Kelly. He also faces a trial in Chicago on federal charges, and additional state sex crime charges in Illinois and Minnesota.
Among those arriving at the courthouse on Wednesday were the parents of Mr. Kelly’s ex-girlfriend Jocelyn Savage. They were among a group who helped expose Mr. Kelly’s interactions with women and encouraged others to speak out.
Ms. Savage, who was Mr. Kelly’s girlfriend at the time of his arrest, had spoken up in the R&B singer’s defense in an interview with Gayle King in 2019. But in an unverified post on the website Patreon later that year, she said that Mr. Kelly had been controlling and abusive during their relationship.
Ms. Savage’s role in the trial is not totally clear. She is currently listed as a potential witness for the defense.
On Wednesday, her parents said they were hopeful about the trial that they had sought for so long.
“It started a long time ago and we have to finish it,” Ms. Savage’s father, Timothy Savage, said in an interview outside the courthouse. “We want to make sure that we have justice for these victims.”
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