NEW YORK — After a six-week trial featuring the testimony of 50 witnesses and three days of closing arguments, the federal racketeering case against Chicago-born R&B star R. Kelly is finally expected to go to the jury on Friday.
Prosecutors are scheduled to wrap up their rebuttal argument before U.S. District Judge Ann Donnelly, who will then instruct the jury on the law and send them back to begin going through the 10-count indictment.
Kelly, 54, was charged in U.S. District Court in Brooklyn in 2019 with heading a criminal enterprise that employed agents, runners, bodyguards and others to lure and trap girls and young women to satisfy his sexually predatory desires.
In this courtroom sketch, R. Kelly, center, sits with his defense attorneys Thomas Farinella, top, and Nicole Blank Becker during the first day of his defense in his sex trafficking case, Sept. 20, 2021, in New York. (Elizabeth Williams/AP)
He faces decades in prison if convicted of the main racketeering charge, though the jury could decide to convict on lesser charges of kidnapping or violations of the Mann Act, which prohibits traveling over state lines for illegal sexual acts.
The trial featured the testimony of a number of alleged victims who told the jury that Kelly manipulated and controlled them and forced them to have sex with him and others — often on videotape.
Throughout the two days of arguments, a large poster board display has had been set up in the middle of Donnelly’s courtroom, which included a mug shot of Kelly in the center and various members of his ever-revolving entourage surrounding him.
To further his goal of recruiting girls for sex, Kelly depended on his team to keep victims in line, Assistant U.S. Attorney Elizabeth Geddes said in her closing argument, which stretched for 6 1/2 hours over two days. They helped keep them confined to rooms in his Olympia Fields mansion, handed out copies of Kelly’s bizarre “rules,” carried backpacks filled with iPads Kelly used to film sexual encounters, and even offered condoms to one victim before she went in to see Kelly, Geddes said.
On Thursday, Geddes spent more than two hours talking about the various tactics Kelly used to control his victims, including intimidation, physical abuse, isolation, and indoctrination by setting strict rules.
Geddes emphasized a video where Kelly was seen telling one victim, “Anna,” that she’d broken his rules and was about to get “four licks.” He then spanked her violently, and later ordered her to walk back and forth on video and call herself a “stupid (expletive),” according to Geddes.
“You saw the absolute anguish on Anna’s face as the defendant spanked her,” Geddes told the jury.
She also talked about the alleged abuse of “Jane,” an aspiring singer who testified Kelly brought her out to California for sex when she was 17 and he was 48.
“He was an accomplished R&B star. She was a junior in high school with dreams of being a singer,” Geddes said. “The power and balance was firmly in place from Day 1 One. And as you’ve learned, Kelly took full advantage.”
Geddes wrapped up her argument around midday Thursday, saying, “It is time to hold the defendant responsible for the pain that he inflicted on each of his victims,” listing the six women included in the main racketeering charge each by their first name. “Convict him.”
Kelly, dressed in a blue suit and wearing a face mask, was animated at the defense table while Geddes wrapped up, scribbling notes, shaking his head, and sometimes rubbing his temples.
In his closing argument, Kelly’s attorney, Deveraux Cannick, said the singer was an international sex symbol known for his playboy lifestyle, but his relationships were consensual and the women who lined up to testify that he sexually abused them are lying to get a payday.
Pacing the floor of the of a Brooklyn federal courtroom and occasionally raising his voice to a shout, Cannick called one of the alleged victims a “super hustler” and a “stalker extraordinaire” and repeatedly accused the government of allowing witnesses to come in and lie to win the big prize.
“Getting a conviction of R. Kelly is a big deal,” Cannick said, telling jurors the government had fallen short. “They gotta try to bring home the bacon … But you can’t want it that bad. You really just can’t.”
In his nearly three-hour closing on Thursday, Cannick said Kelly treated his girlfriends “like gold,” showering them with shopping sprees, private parties, and “money galore.”
But in the years leading up to the Lifetime docuseries “Surviving R. Kelly,” the singer had become toxic, Cannick said. Radio stations stopped playing his songs, venues canceled his shows. When his fortunes tanked, so did his love life. Ultimately, the girls betrayed Kelly, telling lies to get book deals and lawsuits, Cannick said.
“His money dries up and they fly away,” he said. “And you know where they flew to: ‘Surviving R. Kelly.’”
A prosecutor later blasted the assertion that the singer was just enjoying his fame, saying Kelly’s legal team was resorting to classic victim-blaming and had “taken a time machine back to a courthouse in the 1950s.”
“What they were basically insinuating was that all of these woman women and girls were asking for it, and they deserved what they got,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Nadia Shihata told the jury in rebuttal. “It’s not only absurd, it’s shameful.”
Jason Meisner reported from New York and Megan Crepeau from Chicago.
jmeisner@chicagtribune.com
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