R&B superstar R. Kelly had embarked on what was supposed to be a high-flying tour in 2016 when two members of his entourage allegedly expressed concern the singer was physically and psychologically abusing a teenage girl traveling with them.
The girl was kept locked up in a tour bus for hours on end, according to a recent court filing by federal prosecutors in New York. Her eyes were red and puffy. She looked “ruff,” as one employee allegedly put it.
“Something is REALLY strange about the treatment and behavior of the little one,” the employee texted on May 17, 2016, according to the filing. “When she gets to Florida, she needs to RUN & NEVER look back. She should be living the fun life of (an) 18 year old high school senior ... She’s been on punishment 4EVER!”
The employees’ concerns go to the heart of the unusual federal racketeering case against Kelly that is expected to attract national attention when jury selection begins Monday at the federal courthouse in Brooklyn.
Unlike the singer’s previous criminal trial in Cook County over a decade ago, which centered on a single sex tape and ended in acquittal, the expansive indictment in New York accuses him of being the head of a criminal enterprise that for decades used his celebrated musical talents to not only sell records, but also to abuse and enslave girls, produce child pornography and satisfy Kelly’s personal sexual urges.
Legal experts said charging Kelly under the racketeering statute — commonly referred to by the acronym RICO — is likely uncharted territory for the 1970 law, which was originally designed to go after mafia bosses who shielded themselves by using underlings to do their dirty work.
“Here, R. Kelly is the Godfather,” said Jeff Grell, a professor at the University of Minnesota Law School and an expert in RICO law. “The enterprise is the managers, the bodyguards and runners who do his bidding.”
What makes the racketeering charge such a powerful weapon against Kelly, legal experts said, is that prosecutors can give jurors a 30,000-foot view of the singer’s alleged criminal behavior, both in terms of longevity and the number of victims involved.
“It’s an effective tool for prosecutors because it allows them to bring in evidence they might not otherwise be able to bring in, to give jurors a much broader look at the playing field,” said Jeffrey Cramer, a former federal prosecutor who is now senior managing director of the Chicago-based security firm Guidepost Solutions.
To prove the main racketeering count, prosecutors plan to put on evidence that goes back 30 years to when Kelly was rocketing from Chicago street musician to worldwide fame. As his career blossomed, prosecutors say, so did the enterprise, which allegedly used a mix of co-conspirators to recruit girls for Kelly and help keep them under his control.
The evidence includes alleged acts as recent as 2018, as Kelly’s career was crumbling amid the #MeToo movement. It would soon implode when Lifetime’s docuseries “Surviving R. Kelly” brought renewed attention to his alleged crimes.
In all, prosecutors plan to introduce evidence involving 19 women — including at least seven who were minors at the time of the alleged misconduct — as well as additional allegations that Kelly sexually abused a 17-year-old boy he met at a McDonald’s.
Jurors will hear evidence that Kelly knowingly passed a sexually transmitted disease to some victims, orchestrated hush payments to others, and employed a strict system of discipline and psychological manipulation with victims that in some cases spanned years, court records show.
Attorneys for Kelly, meanwhile, will be tasked with poking holes in each of the alleged predicate acts that make up the racketeering charge, challenging witnesses on their memories and motives, and on the existence of any illegal enterprise to begin with, legal experts said.
Among the questions for jurors to sort out: Were the alleged victims really coerced, or were they merely fans of Kelly’s who participated willingly? Did they have a reasonable fear of retaliation for leaving? And, in the case of alleged minor victims, did Kelly actually know they were underage?
Legal experts who spoke to the Tribune said Kelly’s lawyers will clearly have a much tougher time defending this case than at his last criminal trial in 2008, when a Cook County jury decided they couldn’t be sure Kelly was the man seen in a grainy videotape having sex with a 13-year-old girl.
“There isn’t just one thing that can be explained away, like a sex tape where you can argue you can’t tell who’s in it,” Grell said of the charges Kelly now faces. “If prosecutors are able to show this whole scope and pattern of activity, it’s like, ‘Come on.’ It’s overwhelming.”
The stakes couldn’t be higher for Kelly, 54, who has been in federal custody since his arrest in July 2019 and could face decades in prison if convicted. The trial is scheduled to begin in earnest on Aug. 18 with opening statements and is expected to last more than a month.
The outcome may also give guidance how authorities in other districts proceed in other cases against him, including a pending indictment in U.S. District Court in Chicago and other charges brought in Cook County in February 2019.
Long list of accusations
The allegations against Kelly date back to 1991 — two years before his album “12 Play” along with No. 1 single “Bump N’ Grind” were released and go on to sell more than 5 million copies — and center around his musical career both in the studio in Chicago and while on tour performing at venues across the country.
According to the indictment, at the height of Kelly’s fame it was standard practice for his entourage to issue wristbands to girls, some minors, attending his concerts that allowed them backstage access and direct interaction with Kelly.
When Kelly identified a girl he wished to see again, he’d ask for her contact information or direct his associates to obtain it. The girls were then invited to meet with Kelly at future shows, with some provided lodging, according to the charges.
The charges alleged Kelly had rules for the girls he groomed. They were to call him “Daddy” and were not allowed to leave their rooms unless instructed by Kelly to do so, “including to eat or go to the bathroom,” the indictment said.
Many victims allegedly were videotaped by Kelly performing sex acts, and were slapped, spanked or otherwise physically assaulted. Some were told they had to look at the floor. Others were forced to write “letters containing falsehoods and embarrassing allegations for Kelly to use at his discretion if and when the need arose,” prosecutors have alleged.
One of the victims central to the indictment is Aaliyah Haughton, the onetime phenom singer referred to in the charges as Jane Doe #1, who died in a plane crash in the Bahamas in 2001.
Aaliyah met Kelly when she was just 12; as his protege, she went on to become a teenage R&B star. Her smash-hit May 1994 debut album, “Age Ain’t Nothing But a Number,” was produced and written by Kelly.
The indictment alleged an associate of Kelly’s in August 1994 bribed a state employee to create a fake ID for Aaliyah showing she was 18 when in fact she was only 15. The next day, Kelly, then 27, married Aaliyah in a secret ceremony with the falsified paperwork. The marriage was later annulled by a Michigan judge at the insistence of Aaliyah’s family.
Prosecutors have said a witness will testify that Kelly had secretly arranged the marriage after he got her pregnant and wanted to “shield himself” from criminal charges.
Meanwhile, Kelly’s former tour manager, Demetrius Smith, said in the “Surviving R. Kelly” documentary that he’d arranged the forged documents for Kelly and was one of a handful of people present at the small ceremony in the Chicago suburb of Rosemont.
“It was just a quick little ceremony. She didn’t have on a white dress. He didn’t have on a tux,” said Smith, who later told media outlets he’s been subpoenaed to testify in Kelly’s criminal case. “Just everyday wear. She looked worried and scared.”
Another alleged victim, who met Kelly at a mall in 2003 when she was in her early 20s and working as a radio station intern, is expected to testify that she was invited to interview Kelly at his Chicago music studio, where she was forced to sign a nondisclosure agreement before being locked in a room “without sustenance” for three days.
After a member of Kelly’s entourage finally gave her something to drink, she “became tired and dizzy” and passed out, the indictment alleged.
“She woke up some time thereafter to (Kelly) with her in the bedroom in circumstances that made it apparent that he had sexually assaulted her while she was unconscious,” prosecutors alleged.
Also expected to testify is an alleged male victim of Kelly’s, identified as John Doe #1, who says he was sexually abused as a teen after meeting Kelly in December 2006 at an unspecified Chicago McDonald’s.
Prosecutors alleged in a recent court filing that Kelly invited the boy to a party at his Chicago residence, but when the boy brought his parents, Kelly “advised him to come without them to the next gathering.”
Kelly later invited the teen to his music studio “under the guise of helping and mentoring” him with his musical aspirations, prosecutors alleged.
“Kelly also asked John Doe #1 what he was willing to do to succeed in the music business and clarified that he wanted John Doe #1 to engage in sexual contact with Kelly,” prosecutors alleged. “With that backdrop, Kelly then engaged in sexual contact with John Doe #1.”
Prosecutors said Kelly also forced the boy to have sex with females as Kelly videotaped the acts.
RICO creativity
The case against Kelly is just the most recent example of federal prosecutors in New York’s Brooklyn office using the RICO law in rather inventive fashion, legal experts told the Tribune.
In 2015, the office announced an indictment that rocked international sports, charging 14 defendants with racketeering, wire fraud and money laundering conspiracies in connection with FIFA, the worldwide governing body of soccer. The case has already garnered numerous guilty pleas and is still ongoing, though some have accused prosecutors of overstepping the bounds of the law.
Perhaps the closest analogue to the Kelly case, according to one expert, was the successful RICO prosecution of the upstate New York group Nxivm, a cultlike organization that purported to be a self-help group. A federal jury in Brooklyn convicted leader Keith Raniere on charges including racketeering and sex trafficking in June 2019, the month before the RICO indictment against Kelly was unveiled. Raniere was sentenced to 120 years in prison.
Randy D. Gordon, executive professor at Texas A&M University School of Law who has extensively studied RICO, said the Nxivm “sex cult” had a concrete organizational structure reporting to Raniere, while the enterprise Kelly allegedly led appears far looser.
“We’re not even talking about a traditional prostitution ring, though this is sort of within that space of sex trafficking,” Gordon said.
“From the defendant’s perspective, I suppose he can argue that the alleged enterprise is too amorphous and ill-defined,” he said. “... I still think the government has the better argument on the issue of whether the alleged enterprise is just a disguised allegation that Kelly is the enterprise.”
That’s a topic that Kelly’s Chicago-based defense team, which has since been severed from the case, tried to raise in a motion to dismiss last year, arguing the charges failed to specifically name any co-conspirators, which is unusual for a RICO case.
“Robert Kelly is not an enterprise,” attorney Steven Greenberg wrote in a motion at the time. “RICO was not designed as a means to punish a single individual for his own wrongful actions.”
U.S. District Judge Ann Donnelly denied the motion in May 2020, saying it was up to jurors to decide.
G. Robert Blakey, who helped draft the RICO statute decades ago, said a case like Kelly’s was not quite what was pictured when writing the law, but over the years, the statute has proven to be extraordinarily flexible.
To prove their case, prosecutors must show that the enterprise went beyond just Kelly himself, said Blakey, now a professor emeritus at Notre Dame’s law school. But they don’t necessarily have to prove a sophisticated Mafia-like structure existed under him. Case law has held that the enterprise must only be as organized as a pickup basketball game, Blakey said, and Kelly’s indictment more than meets the elements of a RICO case.
“While they’re playing the game, you know who the center is and you know who the guards are. ... Everybody knows where the basketball court is, everybody knows to play on that court and the game goes on even though the people playing it change over time. That’s just like the mob,” he said. “... Can you identify roles in the group that was around Kelly, and did it have reasonable longevity? It’s got to be more than a weekend, it’s got to be years.”
Steven Block, a former federal prosecutor in Chicago, said it’s likely the government “truly considered (Kelly) to be by far the most culpable person, and that is who they wanted to focus their efforts on.”
“It could be (that) other members of enterprise are cooperating with law enforcement, and we might find out at a later time they were charged with indictments under seal,” Block said.
Grell, the RICO expert from the University of Minnesota, agreed that while some of Kelly’s alleged enablers could have faced federal charges of their own, the singer was the true target.
“In this situation the primary goal is to cut the head off the snake,” he said.
jmeisner@chicagotribune.com
mcrepeau@chicagotribune.com
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