“This case is not about a celebrity who likes to party a lot,” assistant US attorney Maria Cruz Melendez told the jury on the first day of R Kelly’s trial. “This case is about a predator.”
At many points during the hearing, the allegations against the disgraced R&B singer were difficult for witnesses to speak about. Dozens of women, and men, gave evidence, the full horror of his crimes officially made public following years of rumours that had been silenced.
R Kelly – once one of the biggest music stars in the world, a three-time Grammy winner whose chart-topping hits include I Believe I Can Fly, Bump ‘N’ Grind and Ignition – had denied all the charges, his lawyers calling his accusers “disgruntled groupies” and saying they were lying, arguing that any “relationships” were consenting.
However, the jury believed the survivors. Robert Sylvester Kelly has now been 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.
Ms Melendez had told the jury in her opening statement that the 54-year-old used his fame to entice his victims and that he “dominated and controlled them physically, sexually and psychologically”. He was a “predator” whose fame brought him “access to girls, boys and young women”, she said.
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Here are some of the key allegations from the month-long trial in Brooklyn.
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Warning: This article contains graphic content.
Marriage to Aaliyah
R Kelly’s marriage to the late R&B singer Aaliyah in 1994 had been speculated about for years. Aaliyah was 15, Kelly 27 when they wed in a secret ceremony following the release of her debut album Age Ain’t Nothing But A Number, which he produced.
During the trial, the singer’s former tour manager Demetrius Smith gave evidence about the relationship – telling the court he bribed a government official to get a fake ID card.
He was forced to testify against his will after being given immunity from future charges.
Recalling the events surrounding the marriage, Mr Smith said he went into a welfare office in Chicago in 1994 and asked an employee who was taking ID photos if they “want to make some money”, before handing over $500.
The welfare card was one of two fake IDs used to allow the R&B artist to marry Aaliyah – full name Aaliyah Dana Haughton – after he began a sexual relationship with her and believed she was pregnant, the court heard. A marriage licence listed Aaliyah as 18.
Prosecutors said Kelly wanted to use the marriage – later annulled by Aaliyah’s parents – to protect himself from criminal charges relating to having sex with a minor and prevent the singer from testifying against him.
Mr Smith repeatedly told the judge during his evidence that he was uneasy about taking the stand, but did not give a specific reason.
However, after further questioning, he revealed how Kelly came to him during a 1994 tour and told him Aaliyah was “in trouble” and that he needed to get home.
Mr Smith said they rushed back to Chicago after a concert in another city so they could arrange the marriage, which was meant “to protect him and Aaliyah”.
Later in the trial, another witness told the court that she saw Kelly in a “sexual situation” with Aaliyah in around 1993 – when Aaliyah would have been aged 13 or 14.
The witness, a former backing dancer for Kelly, also said that he had sex with her when she was 15.
Aaliyah later died in a plane crash in 2001, aged 22. In January 2016, Kelly was asked about his relationship with the young star in an interview with GQ, but did not comment. “Out of respect for her mother who’s sick and her father who’s passed, I will never have that conversation with anyone,” he said.
‘He slapped me and choked me until I passed out’
Kelly’s trial in New York came after years of suspicions and accusations against him. Many of the allegations were featured in the Lifetime documentary series Surviving R Kelly, which aired early in 2019.
While some of the witnesses were not identified in the media, and were referred to as “Jane Does” in court, Jerhonda Pace, who is now 28, was one of the women who appeared in the programme and has spoken out against the singer publicly.
She was the first accuser to give evidence during the trial, telling jurors that Kelly invited her to his mansion and ordered her to take off her clothes when she was a 16-year-old virgin, and a member of his fan club, in 2010.
“He asked me to continue to tell everyone I was 19 and act like I was 21,” she told the court. When she told Kelly she was a virgin, he said that was “good” and told her he wanted to “train her” sexually, she said.
Ms Pace told the jury he knew her age as she had shown him identification, and ordered her to call him “Daddy”.
She said they saw each other for another six months, but Kelly grew more and more controlling and would become violent when she broke what she called “Rob’s rules”. She recalled one time when “he slapped me and choked me until I passed out”. Afterwards, he spat in her face and forced her to have oral sex, she said.
He described the inner workings of the property where the singer had a recording studio, saying it was like being in “the Twilight Zone” and that it sometimes made him “uncomfortable”.
Mr Navarro told the court he never witnessed Kelly sexually abusing victims, but said his job included picking up and driving girls to be with the R&B singer, as well as other tasks associated with his career.
“There’s been times where they (girls) wanted to (leave) but couldn’t because they couldn’t get a ride or we couldn’t get a hold of Rob,” he said.
He recalled being instructed not to talk to girls at the house and having to tell people when girls were no longer in rooms they had been escorted to.
“The things you had to do were just a bit uncomfortable,” he said. “The music and production stuff was really good. All the other stuff was kind of strange… It was almost like the Twilight Zone.”
She also told the court that the singer once beat her with a shoe. On another occasion, he forced her to rub faeces on her face and videotape it, she said.
Ms Doe also said she was coerced into getting an abortion after Kelly said he wasn’t ready to have a child with her.
The pair first came into contact in 2015, when the witness, then 17, was invited to Kelly’s hotel in Orlando, Florida, following a gig during which the then-48-year-old paid “a lot of attention to her”, she told the court.
Ms Doe said she told the singer she was 18 when they met – the age of consent in Florida – and said she wanted to be a singer and hoped to advance her career. However, Kelly told her he needed to be pleased sexually before she could audition, she said.
“I just wanted to sing,” Ms Doe, now 23, testified. “I genuinely wanted his input.”
After the initial abuse, which involved oral sex, Kelly was said to have had sex with the victim on more than one occasion. At one point, the court heard, Ms Doe started experiencing pain during sex, which “got worse to the point where I couldn’t walk”.
She was later diagnosed with herpes.
“This man purposely gave me something he knew he had,” she told the court. “He could have controlled the situation.”
Doe said that when she revealed her real age to Kelly, he slapped her across the face but kept her in his life.
In notes that Doe wrote to herself to follow Kelly’s rules, she had written: “Tell Daddy everything.”
Kelly promised a 17-year-old boy fame in exchange for sex
He said the singer had lured him to his Chicago-area home in 2007 with a false offer to help him with his music career.
Kelly had asked him “what I was willing to do for music”, he told the court, and said he had replied: “I’ll carry your bags… anything you need I’ll be willing to do.”
According to Louis’s testimony, Kelly responded: “That’s not it, that’s not it”, before asking him if he ever fantasised about having sex with men.
He said that Kelly had “crawled down on his knees and proceeded to give me oral sex”, adding: “I wasn’t into it.”
He also said that, on another occasion, Kelly had snapped his fingers to summon a naked girl to perform a sex act on himself and Louis.
The teenage boy continued to see the R&B star because “I really wanted to make it in the music industry”, the court was told.
The witness who didn’t testify due to panic attacks
The filing stated that prosecutors wanted the woman from Florida, referred to as a “Jane Doe”, to testify at Kelly’s trial, but decided against it after she “started to have panic attacks and appeared to have an emotional breakdown” as she listened to the tapes.
While the recordings were played in court, there was no audio for the press and public. A video feed showed Kelly not wearing the headphones that would have allowed him to listen to the evidence.
On tape, the singer was said to be heard saying: “If you lie to me, I’m going to f*** you up.” In a second tape, he was allegedly heard threatening her and accusing her of stealing his Rolex watch.
“You better not ever… take from me again or I will be in Florida and something will happen to you,” he said, according to the documents. “You understand what I’m telling you?”
Kelly allegedly told his victims he had cameras and other recording devices “everywhere” in his Chicago studio and other locations.
‘I was scared. I was ashamed. I was embarrassed’
One witness was a former radio station intern when she met Kelly in 2003, after contacting his representatives about an interview. She told the court she was locked in a darkened room and believes she was drugged and assaulted by Kelly while she was unconscious.
“I was sexually assaulted,” the woman, now 39, told jurors. “It wasn’t something I invited.”
Testifying without using her real name, she said she was a 21-year-old single mother from Salt Lake City, in Utah, when she approached Kelly’s entourage.
She was invited to fly to Chicago and meet Kelly at his music studio, all paid for by the singer, the court was told. When she arrived, she was greeted by someone who made her sign a non-disclosure agreement, demanded personal information about her family and surprised her by asking if she “needed protection” – specifically, a condom, she said.
“No, I’m not here for that,” was her response.
The woman said she was told to wait alone for Kelly in a windowless room. When she tried to step out, she discovered that the door was locked from the outside and that, after banging on the door with no response, she needed permission from Kelly to go to the bathroom or anywhere else, she said.
“I was scared. I was ashamed. I was embarrassed,” she told the court.
Two days went by before she was finally given something to eat, she told the court. After passing out, she says she awoke to find someone had taken off her clothes and that she saw Kelly pulling up his trousers.
It felt like another few days passed before she was put on a flight home, the court heard.
As she left, an employee warned her not to “f*** with Mr Kelly”, she said.
What now?
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 also facing sex abuse charges brought in Illinois and Minnesota – to which he has also pleaded not guilty.
Taylor Swift’s new album helped fuel the highest weekly vinyl sales in 30 years – but is our rediscovered love of owning records environmentally reckless?
PVC (poly vinyl chloride), the plastic from which records have traditionally been made, isn’t great for the planet, and concerns have also been raised over packaging as vinyl sales have risedn in recent years.
Rou Reynolds, frontman of chart-topping rock band Enter Shikari, believes leading artists need to shoulder some responsibility to “push forward” change.
“The bigger you are as an artist, the more influence you have, the more you can push things forward and accelerate progression,” he says.
In an interview with Billboard in March, Billie Eilish criticised how “wasteful it is” when “some of the biggest artists in the world” make “40 different vinyl packages”, each with “a different unique thing just to get you to keep buying more”.
“Its reasonable criticism,” says Reynolds, “but I think it’ll basically dissipate as soon as it becomes the standard to use BioVinyl, for instance – that will really take away the possibility of criticism”.
Rather than make records out of regular PVC pellets, over the last few years it has become possible to use renewable sources such as cooking oil or wood pulp.
“Traditional vinyl is an oil-based product,” Reynolds explains. “No one really wants to support the extraction of any more fossil fuels.”
Enter Shikari now insist all their records are made using BioVinyl, and Reynolds is optimistic that if more artists make demands about what their records are made from, it would become the new norm.
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“A lot of independent artists, like myself, we can light these fires, then it spreads and before you know it, it will become the industry standard.”
‘The advances are incredible’
Leading voices within vinyl production want the music industry to listen.
“Along with the Vinyl Alliance and the Vinyl Records Manufacturers Association, we’re looking at the whole manufacturing chain,” says Karen Emanuel, chief executive of Key Production, the UK’s largest broker for physical music production.
“I’ve been in the business probably about 35 years and the advances that have been made, it’s incredible. A lot of the big plastics companies, for PVC they’ve found a way replacing the fossil fuel elements [which] could mean as much as a 90% reduction in the carbon footprint of the vinyl.”
The catch, at the moment, is the cost.
“It’s a bit more expensive to manufacture but if enough people manufacture with it then the price point will come down… it’s something that we’re really trying to push people towards.”
Would fans be happy to pay more for a greener product?
Lee Jefferies, the owner of Leicestershire-based vinyl pressing plant Sonic Wax Pressing, is such a big vinyl lover, he spent £100,000 buying the world’s most valuable Motown record.
“Ultimately everything works from retail back,” he says “And with retail prices already being quite high on vinyl it’s very hard for people to have the extra money to buy biodegradable vinyl.”
But a recent survey conducted by Key Production found more than two thirds (69%) of vinyl buyers indicated they would be encouraged to buy more if the records were made with a reduced environmental impact.
The findings also revealed that the vast majority, 77%, of regular vinyl customers are willing to pay a premium for reduced impact products, signalling a significant market demand for eco-friendly alternatives.
Is there a bigger problem?
Ultimately, either the consumer, artists or labels will have to shoulder the cost if vinyl is to be made more sustainably.
But while a big old hunk of PVC might feel like the least green option, are we getting ourselves in a spin when we should also be looking in another direction?
Figures from the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) put global vinyl sales for last year at about 80 million – using the IMPALA indepdent music companies association’s music emissions calculator, that works out at producing around 156k tonnes of CO2 emissions.
If you compare that to streaming, with Spotify alone – responsible for about a third of the market – its own estimates for its global carbon emissions were 280k tonnes last year, with vast amounts of electricity being used to power its data storage servers.
For Enter Shikari’s Reynolds, the potential to make vinyl greener is exciting.
“It has the same quality, the same appearance, you really wouldn’t notice the difference, which is incredible,” he says. “I think it speaks to, you know, a lot of the time people think that the transition society is about to go through, we think we’re going to lose luxuries… but I think this is just an example of why that’s not the case.
“You know, all it takes is some thought and some adaptation, and then some adoption… it’s super exciting.”
Perhaps now it’s time for the music industry to take note.
Lily Tomlin, Morgan Fairchild and Ben Stiller have led tributes to “one-of-a-kind” actor Dabney Coleman following his death aged 92.
Coleman made his career playing comedic villains, mean-spirited bosses and villains in films including 9 to 5 and Tootsie, as well as playing Commodore Louis Kaestner in Boardwalk Empire.
Lily Tomlin, who starred alongside him in 9 To 5 with Jane Fonda and Dolly Parton, said: “We just loved him.”
In her post to X, the actress shared a photo of her character Violet Newstead dressed in a Snow White costume beside a tense-looking Coleman as her egotistical boss Franklin Hart Jr.
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Morgan Fairchild, who starred in Falcon Crest and Friends, described Coleman as a “great one”.
“So very sorry to hear of the death of the wonderful #DabneyColeman”, she wrote on X alongside a black and white photo of them together.
“We went out for a bit in the ’80s and I adored him. This town has lost one of a kind!”
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Coleman “took his last earthly breath peacefully and exquisitely” in his Santa Monica home on Thursday, his daughter said in a statement on Friday on behalf of the family.
“My father crafted his time here on Earth with a curious mind, a generous heart and a soul on fire with passion, desire and humour that tickled the funny bone of humanity”, she said.
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“As he lived, he moved through this final act of his life with elegance, excellence and mastery.”
Ben Stiller, Zoolander and Meet The Parents actor, praised Coleman for paving the way for character actors.
“The great Dabney Coleman literally created, or defined, really – in a uniquely singular way – an archetype as a character actor.
“He was so good at what he did it’s hard to imagine movies and television of the last 40 years without him.”
Coleman starred in a number of films and TV series in the 1960s, then made his breakthrough as a corrupt mayor in the satirical soap opera Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman, in 1976.
His film credits include a computer scientist in WarGames, Tom Hanks’ father in You’ve Got Mail and a chief firefighter in The Towering Inferno.
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He won a best actor Golden Globe for The Slap Maxwell Story and an Emmy for best supporting actor in Peter Levin’s 1987 legal drama Sworn To Silence.
Coleman also won two Screen Actors Guild Awards as part of the cast of crime drama Boardwalk Empire and received Emmy and Golden Globe nominations for his starring role in the NBC sitcom Buffalo Bill.
Blue Peter’s youngest ever presenter has claimed disgraced entertainer Rolf Harris sexually assaulted her when she was a teenage host of the children’s show.
Yvette Fielding, who joined the long-running BBCprogramme aged 18, told the Sun newspaper how the paedophile predator squeezed and patted her bottom after finding herself alone with him in a TV studio.
The now 55-year-old also recalled an uncomfortable experience with “grotesque” Jimmy Savile, who was later revealed to be one of Britain’s most prolific sex offenders.
Fielding has questioned the role of the BBC in allowing their behaviour, arguing people in the industry “must have known”.
She became a Blue Peter presenter in 1987 and left five years later, going on to host a string of BBC programmes including The Heaven And Earth Show, The General and City Hospital.
Recounting the incident with Harris, she said: “It was very confusing and shocking – just bizarre to think Rolf Harris was squeezing and patting my bottom and I am standing there, thinking ‘I don’t know what to do’.
“Other people in the industry must have known what he was like and you left me alone in the studio with him.
“That shouldn’t have happened. I must have been 18 or 19.
He was also known to be associated with Savile, who managed to conceal his crimes until after his death in 2011.
On her meeting with the late depraved DJ, Fielding told the Sun: “He took my hand and started stroking it. ‘Look into my eyes’, he said, ‘And tell me what you’re thinking’.”
“He was grotesque,” she added.
“I just don’t understand why the BBC allowed him to get away with that for as long as he did.”
Savile worked for much of his career at the BBC presenting programmes including Top Of The Pops and Jim’ll Fix It.