A federal jury in Chicago on Wednesday convicted fallen R&B idol R. Kelly of six of the 12 crimes he was charged with: three child pornography and three pedophilia.
Its 12 members found it proven, after an 11-hour deliberation, spread over two days, that he recorded himself sexually abusing a girl, who was then 14 years old at the end of the 1990s.
During the trial, the identity of the victim, today a 37-year-old woman, was kept behind the alias, common in American procedural law, of
Jane
.
The musician now has to know the sentence;
each of these crimes carries in the State of Illinois prison sentences of up to 10 years.
Last June, a New York judge sentenced him to 30 years in prison on nine counts of sexual abuse and trafficking, nine months after a court found him guilty in a highly publicized trial in which the testimonies of 45 of his victims, who painted him as a powerful man who used his fame to, with the help of his collaborators, weave a network of abuse, often committed against minors.
Then seven men and two women accused him.
That legal victory was interpreted in the United States as a racial milestone in the Me Too movement.
This Wednesday, Robert Sylvester Kelly, 55, was also acquitted of conspiring to obstruct justice in a trial brought against him in 2002, also in Chicago, in whose south zone he grew up and developed his career, as well as of a plot to get child pornography
Dressed in a navy blue suit and behind black glasses, the singer has listened undaunted to the verdict.
Two of his collaborators, Derrel McDavid and Milton Brown, who were found not guilty by the jury, also sat in the dock.
The facts for which Kelly has been convicted this Wednesday were already the subject of a trial, after in 2002 the video came to the eyes of a Chicago music journalist, Jim DeRogatis.
The victim then lied to the grand jury investigating the case, claiming that she was not the girl in the video, and that he had never had sex with Kelly.
She also did not appear at the trial, which made it possible for the musician to be declared innocent in 2008.
In reality, Jane had a relationship with the artist for several years, and she did not decide to speak up until a documentary series titled
Surviving R. Kelly
(2019), produced by the black filmmaker Dream Hampton, which gave the voice to several of the women who had been accusing him for years, revived the case against the musician.
According to the indictment, Jane's first silence was due to a criminal conspiracy by Kelly and her henchmen to convince her and other girls then recorded not to cooperate with justice.
According to several witnesses, the singer desperately tried to recover those porn recordings with minors, which at the time he took from inside a gym bag to distribute them around the city.
In the second process, which began last August, the prosecution stated that it offered up to a million dollars to recover the evidence of his crimes.
Kelly's first suspicions come from his heyday in the 1990s, when he was an R&B superstar, the quintessentially American consumer music style that brought
soul up
to date in the last decade of the century.
Her biggest hit in Europe was, in 1996,
I Believe I Can Fly.
At that time, and despite her fame, it was common to see her in a Chicago McDonald's where she went, her witnesses remember, hunting students from a nearby institute.
Jane was one of those girls.
She was a member of a vocal group with other teenagers.
She met Kelly when she was studying in high school.
She visited her recording studio with an aunt, a professional singer.
Shortly after that meeting, Jane told her parents that Kelly would be her best man.
When they learned of the video, Kelly knelt before them and begged them to forgive him, according to her daughter's testimony.
She this she implored them not to take action against the musician because she "loved" him.
Subscribe here to the EL PAÍS América
newsletter
and receive all the key information on current affairs in the region.
