Everybody knew the allegations against R Kelly – so why has it taken 30 years to get justice?
R Kelly’s trial was the culmination of decades of accusations, pointing to a predator hiding in plain sight.
Rumours and allegations about the now disgraced R&B singer date back to almost the beginning of his career – and yet, he rose to become a chart-topper, a Grammy winner, an artist who filled arenas and collaborated with huge stars; at his height, one of the biggest recording acts in the world.
The criminal details of his marriage to Aaliyah in 1994, when she was 15 and he was 27 – now detailed in open court, a former tour manager admitting he bribed an official to get a fake ID in order for the ceremony to go ahead – had always been a well-known secret. And in 2002, Kelly was charged with 21 counts of making indecent images of children. After years of delays to his trial, the singer was acquitted, but the allegations never went away.
Please use Chrome browser for a more accessible video player
R Kelly ‘will appeal’ sex abuse charges
Claims made over the years were silenced and brushed over, by an industry that wanted to keep the money rolling in, and fans who did not want to believe Kelly could have committed the crimes he was accused of. The world wanted to hear his music, so his unknown accusers were easy to ignore.
In the end, it was a documentary series, Surviving R Kelly, released in 2019, that became the catalyst for the singer’s trial in New York, and ultimately led to him being found guilty of all nine charges brought against him – one charge of racketeering and eight counts of violating a law which prohibits transporting people across state lines for prostitution.
For Jim DeRogatis, a journalist and music critic who wrote his first investigative report on Kelly for the Chicago Sun-Times in December 2000, with details of an allegation made against the singer dating back to 1991, it has been a long time coming.
“I always felt like I was late to the story when my partner at the Sun-Times, Abdon Pallasch, and I did the first investigative report,” he tells Sky News. “It had been going on already for nine years. We never thought when that paper came out… that this would still be ongoing in 2021.”
Just over a year later, DeRogatis was anonymously sent a videotape. “There was a manila envelope with a VHS cassette,” he says. “No markings on either.” The contents of the tape, he says, were horrifying. “Twenty-six minutes and 39 seconds showed Kelly very clearly having sexual contact with a 14-year-old girl, urinating in her mouth at one point.”
The tape led to the 2002 charges and the delayed trial in 2008. But Kelly was acquitted and continued to prey on young girls.
“He thought he was untouchable,” says DeRogatis. “There was a hubris, an ego there… He was silencing victims with money.” The most shocking thing about the case, he says, is the timeframe, and how Kelly was allowed to get away with what he was doing because of his fame.
R Kelly was once one of the biggest music stars in the world
“During that time, he’s selling 100 million albums – of his own, and [records and songs] he produced for everyone from Whitney Houston and Celine Dion to Lady Gaga and Justin Bieber. This was a cash machine for the music industry that was well aware of his behaviour and never actually acted to stop it.”
DeRogatis never stopped his reporting, helping to tell the stories of 48 different accusers over the past 21 years. But it was Surviving R Kelly that finally got people listening, he says.
“There were police officers who valiantly tried to stop his predatory behaviour. But, you know, until Surviving R Kelly brought these women into people’s living rooms in America, and they saw woman after woman after woman; 12 different women appeared on camera, telling their stories. They cannot all be liars.”
So why did justice take so long?
Kenyette Tisha Barnes, the co-founder of the #MuteRKelly movement – launched in 2017 to make calls to boycott the singer’s music and shows, and “hold accountable those who allowed this behaviour to go on for so long” – says the answer is simple: “Because these were young black girls from inner-city Chicago.”
It has taken movements such as #MeToo and Time’s Up, as well as #MuteRKelly, to get to this point, she says.
“I was a big R Kelly fan many years ago, in the ’90s. And I remember the stories. I started to hear about Aaliyah and the other young ladies, and they were always young black girls.
“I was a black girl, I’m a black woman in this country. And I’ve watched the way the entertainment industry, our whole community, maligned these young women for years. And enough was just enough.”
R Kelly is also facing sex abuse charges brought in Illinois and Minnesota – to which he has also pleaded not guilty
DeRogatis agrees it was a “problem of race”, saying: “What the 48 women whose stories I’ve told in the last 21 years have all said to me is that nobody matters less in America than young black girls. They are simply not believed, and women in general are not believed about a sexual abuse story. But black girls in particular.”
For Kelly, who last released a studio album in 2016, the guilty verdict in New York is not the end of his legal troubles; he is facing further sex abuse charges brought in Illinois and Minnesota – to which he has also pleaded not guilty.
So if the trials go ahead, there could be more allegations against the singer to come. And thanks to this first trial in New York, the spotlight is now also firmly on those who at best turned a blind eye; at worst, enabled him.
Charging the singer with racketeering meant prosecutors set out to show him as the leader of “an enterprise” where “managers, bodyguards, drivers, personal assistants and runners” were all complicit in recruiting women and girls for sex with him.
DeRogatis says there are others who should be facing charges and Barnes agrees that while Kelly was “at the top of the pyramid”, there is still “a lot of blame to go around”.
“Number one, it’s R Kelly,” she says. “Number two, it’s the people who enabled it. It’s the producers, the promoters, the runners, the people in his camp who were more interested in being aligned with a superstar than actually protecting black girls.
“And then we go further: it’s the black community. We’re all complicit. If you’ve ever played an R Kelly song, you’re complicit. If you’ve ever watched that videotape, you’re complicit. I think we have to unpack that reality that we all allowed this man to just move in the most predatory ways.”
“The racketeering statute is generally used against mob bosses and drug kingpins,” says DeRogatis. “We only have one person indicted. How are you a criminal enterprise if no one else in your alleged enterprise is being held to account?”
Arturo Suarez cries as he hugs his family for the first time in months.
His sister’s modest home in Caracas, Venezuela’s capital city, is decorated with red, blue and black balloons and banners to welcome him back.
Friends and neighbours fill the living room and the street outside.
Mr Suarez reunited with his family
He video calls other family members elsewhere in the world. This is the first time they have heard his voice since March.
“I hadn’t felt so safe for a while,” Arturo tells Sky News, “when I hugged my brothers, my uncle, my aunt, that’s where I felt that the nightmare was over, that I had made it home.”
Then the story of what he had endured begins to pour out of him.
The 34-year-old was one of more than 250 Venezuelan men sent by the Trump administration to a maximum security prison in El Salvador, despite having no criminal record in any of the four countries he has lived in.
Mr Suarez speaks to Martha Kelner
Last week, he was released as part of a prisoner swap with 10 American citizens and permanent residents detained in Venezuela.
But he is scarred by the four months he spent at the CECOT prison, a terrorism confinement centre, in El Salvador, alongside some of the world’s most dangerous men.
Arturo Suarez back with his family in Caracas
Read more from Sky News:
‘Everyone’s on edge’: Epping braces for another hotel protest
Ozzy Osbourne dies just weeks after farewell show
“We were constantly beaten,” he says, “we suffered physical, verbal, and psychological abuse.
“There wasn’t a day the wardens didn’t tell us that the only way we’d leave that place was if we were dead. In fact, the first words the head of the prison said to us after the first beating was ‘welcome to hell’.”
Arturo is an aspiring singer. He had moved to the US to escape Venezuela’s authoritarian regime and set up home in North Carolina.
Mr Suarez is an aspiring singer
He had a feeling when Donald Trump became president for a second time that there would be a crackdown on immigration, as promised in his campaign.
But, because Arturo had followed all the legal channels to enter the country, he didn’t think he would be caught up in the deportation policy. He was wrong.
While he was filming a music video in a house in North Carolina in March, he was arrested by immigration agents and accused by the White House of being a gang member, although they have provided little evidence publicly to support that claim.
His family had not heard from him since March
He was then flown to El Salvador – a country he had never even visited – and put in a maximum security prison. His ordeal was under way.
“We were sleeping 19 people to a cell,” he says, “if we spoke loudly, they would take away our mattresses, if they found us bathing more than once a day, they’d take away the mattresses from us.
“The punishment was severe. It was beatings and humiliations and they took away our food.
“I remember we were exercising and a cellmate, very politely, asked the prison head if we could bathe a second time that day, since we were doing exercise.
“His words were ‘that’s your problem, it’s not my problem if you exercise’. We were also made to eat with our hands.
“They tried to take our humanity away from us. They tried to make us lose everything.”
The Trump administration paid El Salvador millions of dollars to detain the 252 Venezuelan men, claiming they were part of the notorious Tren De Aragua gang.
Homeland Security Secretary, Kristi Noem, visited the prison for a tour and photoshoot in March and Arturo saw her.
“Obviously they did a show of this,” he says, “they had cameras. When she came in, my cellmates and I began to make the help sign, which she disliked a lot. We began to shout freedom.”
Arturo was denied due process to appeal his extradition to El Salvador and was not allowed to speak to a lawyer or any family or friends during his time in prison.
I spoke to Arturo’s brother Nelson in April as he appealed for his release.
He said Arturo’s only crime was having tattoos, which the White House cited as evidence of involvement with gangs.
On a video call, Arturo shows me the tattoos.
Most of them, he says, are in tribute to his late mother. I ask if he thinks that the Trump administration believed he was a gang member.
“I think it was just an excuse to get us out,” he says, “we weren’t taken for having tattoos or belonging to a criminal gang.
“We were taken for being Venezuelans. And today I want to tell the world that being Venezuelan is not a crime.”
Listen to The World with Richard Engel and Yalda Hakim every Wednesday
When he applied for asylum in the United States, Arturo had hoped to be reunited eventually with his wife, Nathali, and their 10-month-old daughter Nahiara, who are currently in Chile.
“When I was given the opportunity to go to the United States, I was going to go with my wife,” he says, “we found out that she was pregnant but I went anyway because it was for the future, for my daughter’s future.
“Unfortunately, this decision led me to one of the most brutal prisons. What I most long for, is to be with my daughter and my wife.”
He’s now being supported by other family members in Venezuela, but he will never return to the US.
He went for a better life but instead was labelled a criminal. Now, he says, he just wants to clear his name.
A judge in the US has rejected a justice department bid to unseal grand jury materials related to the sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
The US government had filed a motion to unseal grand jury transcripts related to the former financier, who took his own life while awaiting trial in 2019.
Materials from grand juries are typically kept secret under US law, though exceptions can be made for a handful of reasons.
In a ruling issued on Wednesday, US District Judge Robin Rosenberg said the justice department’s request did not fall into any of these exceptions.
It comes as Epstein’s former girlfriend, Ghislaine Maxwell, has been officially subpoenaed to testify to the House Oversight Committee from prison.
The grand juries on Epstein were held in Florida in 2005 and 2007, according to a court document.
Under the US justice system, grand juries decide whether there is a criminal case against a person and whether they should be put on trial.
In 2007, prosecutors agreed not to bring federal charges against Epstein in exchange for him agreeing to plead guilty to state charges of solicitation of prostitution, for which he served 13 months in prison.
Last Friday, Donald Trump said attorney general Pam Bondi had been asked to release the transcripts because of “the ridiculous amount of publicity given to Jeffrey Epstein”.
The Department of Justice said criminal cases against Epstein and Maxwell were a matter of public interest.
Undated handout file photo issued by US Department of Justice of Ghislaine Maxwell with Jeffrey Epstein. Pic: PA
The department previously said it had around 200 documents relating to Epstein and that the FBI had thousands more.
It is unknown how much of this is grand jury testimony.
The judge’s decision is the first ruling in a series of attempts by President Trump’s administration to release more information on the case amid calls by some in his MAGA group of supporters for the full details of Epstein’s activities to be released.
Mr Trump has faced renewed scrutiny over his relationship with Epstein since his administration’s U-turn on the so-called “Epstein files”.
Read more:
All we know about the ‘friendship’
Trump denies writing birthday letter to Epstein
Donald Trump had pledged to release the ‘Epstein files’ – and his U-turn has riled supporters. Pic: AP
The MAGA movement had accused the Biden administration of suppressing the extent of Epstein’s crimes and Mr Trump pledged to release the files during his second presidential term.
But after a review of the evidence, the justice department said recently that no “further disclosure would be appropriate or warranted”.
As pressure has grown for Mr Trump to act, there has been increased attention paid to claims he was friends with Epstein – a relationship he denies.
The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) last week published a story saying Mr Trump wrote a bawdy letter to Epstein to give him as a 50th birthday present in 2003.
Mr Trump responded by filing a lawsuit against Rupert Murdoch, who owns the WSJ, two WSJ reporters and the publication’s owner, News Corp, as well as saying the letter was a “fake”.
The summons for Ghislaine Maxwell from the House Oversight Committee is for a deposition to occur on 11 August.
Chairman of the committee, Republican James Comer said: “I have issued a subpoena to Ghislaine Maxwell for a deposition to occur at Federal Correctional Institution Tallahassee on August 11, 2025.
“The Department of Justice is cooperating and will help facilitate the deposition at the prison.”
A man who murdered four University of Idaho students in November 2022 has been sentenced to life in prison – as the mother of one of his victims expressed her disappointment that he won’t be executed.
Bryan Kohberger, a 30-year-old former criminal justice student, initially denied the killings but later pleaded guilty as part of a deal that meant he would avoid the death penalty.
Kohberger sneaked into the rented home in Moscow, Idaho, which is not far from the university campus, through a kitchen sliding door and murdered Ethan Chapin, Xana Kernodle, Madison Mogen and Kaylee Goncalves.
Bryan Kohberger in court, and his victims Kaylee Goncalves, Maddie Mogen and Xana Kernodle, and Xana’s boyfriend Ethan Chapin. Pic: AP
Kohberger has never revealed his motive and it is not clear why he spared two roommates who were in the home.
Post-mortem examinations showed the four who died were stabbed multiple times and were likely asleep when they were attacked – with some sustaining defensive wounds.
Kohberger was arrested at his parents’ home in Pennsylvania weeks after the killings following a nationwide search.
Judge Steven Hippler sentenced Kohberger to four life sentences without parole for four counts of first-degree murder today.
Kaylee Goncalves (bottom left), Maddie Mogen (top left) and Xana Kernodle, and Xana’s boyfriend Ethan Chapin
A ‘delusional, pathetic, hypochondriac loser’
Family members of the victims gave statements in court today ahead of the sentencing – with the murderer’s mother Maryann Kohberger in attendance for the hearing.
Ms Kohberger quietly wept at times as the other parents described their grief.
Ms Goncalves’ mother Kristi Goncalves said she was disappointed that Kohberger won’t be executed by firing squad but revelled in how he would suffer in prison.
“You will always be remembered as a loser, an absolute failure,” she said.
“Hell will be waiting,” she added.
Kristi Goncalves at a hearing earlier this month. Pic: AP
Alivea Goncalves, the victim’s sister, drew applause after belittling Kohberger, who remained expressionless as she insulted him.
“You didn’t win, you just exposed yourself as the coward you are,” she said. “You’re a delusional, pathetic, hypochondriac loser.”
Steve Goncalves, the victim’s father, spoke to Kohberger directly and said: “Today we are here to finish what you started.”
Kohberger nodded subtly in response.
Alivea Goncalves speaks during the sentencing hearing. Pic: AP
Mr Goncalves added: “You tried to break our community apart, you tried to plant fear, you tried to divide us. You failed.”
In a statement read on her behalf by her lawyer, Ms Mogen’s mother Karen Laramie said: “Any one of us would have given our own life to have been outshone by hers.”
Ms Mogens’ mother declined to address Kohberger directly, as he remained expressionless, but closed her statement by saying the family might never forgive him or “ask for mercy” for what he did.
“His acts are too heinous,” her statement read.
Karen and Scott Laramie, the mother and stepfather of Madison Mogen, outside court. Pic: AP
Bethany Funke, who survived the attack, said about her roommates in a statement to the court: “I hated and still hate that they are gone, but for some reason, I am still here and I got to live. I still think about this every day. Why me? Why did I get to live, and not them?”
She described one of the victims, Ms Kernodle, as “one in a million. She was the life of the party”.
Much of her statement was devoted to remembering her four close friends who died – recounting the nights they spent binge-watching reality television, making dinner together, going to parties at their university and the love that they had for each other.
Her testimony reduced many at the hearing to tears.
Bryan Kohberger. Pic: Reuters
Dylan Mortensen, the second surviving roommate, said in court that she has panic attacks that force her to relive the trauma of what she experienced.
She said: “I was too terrified to close my eyes, terrified that if I blinked, someone might be there. I made escape plans everywhere I went… “He may have shattered parts of me but I’m still putting myself back together piece by piece,”
Kohberger’s head bobbed slightly as she spoke.
-
Sports3 years ago‘Storybook stuff’: Inside the night Bryce Harper sent the Phillies to the World Series
-
Sports1 year agoStory injured on diving stop, exits Red Sox game
-
Sports2 years agoGame 1 of WS least-watched in recorded history
-
Sports2 years agoMLB Rank 2023: Ranking baseball’s top 100 players
-
Sports4 years ago
Team Europe easily wins 4th straight Laver Cup
-
Sports2 years agoButton battles heat exhaustion in NASCAR debut
-
Environment2 years agoJapan and South Korea have a lot at stake in a free and open South China Sea
-
Environment2 years agoGame-changing Lectric XPedition launched as affordable electric cargo bike