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A federal judge in Chicago sentenced R. Kelly on Thursday to one additional year in prison on top of his 30-year New York conviction, ending a yearslong legal battle over the R&B superstar’s sexual abuse of women and girls.
U.S. District Judge Harry Leinenweber handed down the sentence late Thursday morning at the Dirksen Federal Courthouse in Chicago.
Kelly, 56, is already serving a sentence for a federal racketeering conviction in New York. The new sentence will be served consecutively with his New York sentence, meaning that Kelly could be locked up until he’s in late 70s.
The sentence comes five months after a federal jury in Chicago found Kelly guilty of three counts of producing child pornography and three counts of enticing a minor into criminal sexual activity.
Prosecutors asked for a sentence of 25 years which, if served after the 30-year sentence he’s already serving for a New York conviction, would’ve essentially been a life sentence.
But Kelly’s lawyer said issuing a consecutive, or additional, sentence would be “overkill.”
Earlier in the hearing, Kelly’s victims told the judge why they think Kelly should spend the rest of his life in prison for sexually abusing them when they were minors.
“I have lost so much due to this,” said one woman, identified in court as Pauline.
She accused Kelly of pitting her against her friend Jane, another victim who testified at Kelly’s trial, and they no longer talk.
An attorney for Jane read a statement from her: “Robert shattered me. I need closure. And I need Robert in jail for as long as the law will allow.”
A third woman, identified in court as Nia, said she is not a “revengeful person” but that the judge should sentence Kelly to stay behind bars for the rest of his life. “You came before this judge because something is wrong with you,” Nia said, addressing Kelly as he sat with his attorney at the Dirksen Federal Courthouse.
Kelly went to trial in Chicago weeks after he was sentenced in New York, and some legal experts said the case here offered “insurance” in the event Kelly’s New York conviction is overturned.
The verdict also brought potential closure to a decades-long saga in Kelly’s hometown. The star witness in the Chicago case was a woman known in court as “Jane.” Now in her late 30s, she has long been at the center of sexual abuse allegations against Kelly — and Kelly’s attorneys recently revealed that she is seeking millions in restitution from the star.
In one of the starker moments in Kelly’s Chicago trial, jurors watched snippets from three videos depicting Kelly’s sexual abuse of Jane.
Jane met Kelly in the mid-1990s, when she was 12 or 13. She said they were introduced by her aunt.
Jane eventually asked Kelly to be her godfather, but their conversations later turned sexual. Once, in the “wee hours” at Kelly’s studio, she said Kelly groped her on a couch.
Jane said Kelly began to sexually abuse her when she was about 14. It turned to sexual intercourse when she was 15. She told the jury the abuse occurred “innumerable times … like, uncountable.”
The Chicago jury also convicted Kelly for his abuse of two others who were underage at the time, Pauline and Nia.
Pauline declared to the jury that she and Kelly “f---ed a lot.” Now in her late 30s, she said Jane introduced her to Kelly when she and Jane were 14. She said her abuse by Kelly turned to sexual intercourse when she was 15 or 16, and she said she participated in numerous threesomes with Kelly and Jane.
Nia, now in her early 40s, said she met Kelly at age 15 in 1996. She said Kelly touched her breasts and masturbated in a hotel room after a concert in Minneapolis, and he once fondled her in a hallway in his Chicago recording studio.
Singer R. Kelly sits between his lawyers during his federal trial in Chicago last year.
L.D. Chukman for the Sun-Times