Celebrity

R Kelly sentenced to additional 20 years imprisonment

24 Feb 2023
R Kelly sentenced to additional 20 years imprisonment

R. Kelly, the disgraced musician, will serve one additional year in prison on top of his current 30-year term.

After a New York trial, the singer was sentenced to three decades in prison for racketeering and trafficking in prostitution.

He was found guilty of soliciting minors for sex and creating child sexual imagery in a second federal trial in Chicago a few months later.

He is currently serving a 20-year sentence for the offences, however, 19 of those years will be served concurrently with the prior one.

He would spend his entire sentence in prison, which would take him until his mid-80s.

In the second case, federal prosecutors were asking for a term of 25 years, which was longer than what was called for by federal sentencing guidelines. They claimed that the fact that Kelly recorded his victims and afterwards posted part of the footage online made his actions worse.

“Because Kelly is Kelly, more people have watched child pornography,” they said in a memo, adding that “The effects of Kelly’s conduct are wide-ranging, incalculable and irreversible.”

According to the report, Kelly has an "insatiable" urge to damage kids, therefore a hefty term is necessary to "guard the community" from additional harm.

Kelly's defense lawyer, Jennifer Bonjean, had requested the judge to let him serve both sentences concurrently, which would have meant that he would have completed both at once. A further sentence, according to her, would be equivalent to a "second life sentence."

She further asserted that the prosecution had "embellished" the story in order to "inflame" the opinions of the former R&B singer.

The victim, who went by the alias "Jane," claimed in the Chicago trial that Kelly had violated her sexually hundreds of times before she turned 18.

Throughout the trial, jurors were shown three videos of the abuse. Kelly was also accused of assaulting four other women when they were kids.

Jurors in Kelly's previous trial in New York were told that he helped his managers and other members of his entourage transit women around the Country for sexual abuse.

The Grammy-winning singer, who is best known for songs like Ignition (Remix) and the immensely successful 1996 anthem I Believe I Can Fly, is one of the most well-known artists who have been accused of abuse following the #MeToo movement.

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