After decades of dodging claims he was a platinum-selling predator, Grammy-winning R&B singer R. Kelly was charged Friday with 10 counts of aggravated sex abuse in Chicago.
Kelly arrived at a Chicago police precinct at about 8:15 p.m. Friday in a dark-colored van with heavily-tinted windows.
He wore a puffy blue winter jacket as he headed into the precinct. Kelly’s security detail kept reporters and cameramen at arm’s length, and he did not answer any questions.
Kelly was expected to be held overnight and appear in court on Saturday.
The new indictment involves four victims, three of them minors at the time, Cook County State Attorney Kim Foxx said.
Kelly was “shell-shocked” and “extraordinarily disappointed and depressed” by the felony charges, his lawyer Steve Greenberg told the Associated Press.
Greenberg said he offered to sit down with prosecutors to explain why the charges were “baseless,” but that never happened.
Shortly after the blockbuster charging announcement, lawyer Michael Avenatti said one of the underage victims was his client.
Avenatti said video he turned over to Foxx’s office earlier this month showed Kelly having sex with a 14-year-old girl in or around 1999 — and also showed the singer urinating on the girl.
The 40-minute video “leaves no question” the girl was underage at the time, and Kelly knew it, Avenatti said.
He said both Kelly and the girl referred to her age “in excess of 10 separate times on the video,” and that the girl also called Kelly “daddy.”
The lawyer released images from the video on Twitter, including one with a red arrow pointing to the mole on Kelly’s back that featured prominently in the singer’s 2008 sex-tape trial, which ended in his acquittal.
“The video is far superior (to) the video that was used in connection with the 2008 trial. It is an entirely different video,” Avenatti said.
“This was in no way role-playing during some sexual act,” he said. “Mr. Kelly throughout the video stops what he’s doing, stops his acts of sexual assault, and he proceeds to move the video camera and adjust the camera angle, zooming in, changing the direction of the shot, and things of that nature.”
Avenatti, best known for representing Stormy Daniels in her lawsuits against President Trump, called the criminal charges filed Friday a “watershed moment.”
“I’m extremely confident that at the end of this journey, R. Kelly will be convicted on multiple counts,” he said. “He will rightfully die in a prison.”
Avenatti said he started working on the case in April and now represents two alleged victims, two parents and two “whistleblowers.”
“I think this is the tip of the iceberg,” he said during the press conference streamed live by NBC News, adding that his office has obtained a second video and is pursuing a third.
Asked to address Kelly directly, Avenatti said: “It is high time you face justice for the conduct you’ve engaged in for the better part of two decades. And don’t count on ever getting out of prison.”
The 10 counts approved against Kelly each carry a possible sentence of three to seven years in prison, but probation is possible, Foxx said Friday. The incidents charged in the indictment occurred between May 1998 and January 2010.
The “I Believe I Can Fly” artist has faced sexual misconduct allegations throughout his career, including multiple accusations of sexual interaction with minors, but he has denied any wrongdoing.
Allegations against Kelly gained renewed attention earlier this year when Lifetime aired a six-part documentary series titled, “Surviving R. Kelly.”
After the series aired, Foxx urged any victims to come forward.
She described the claims made about the singer as “deeply, deeply disturbing.”
“It takes the courage to relive and repeatedly reexperience trauma by telling your story of sexual victimization, but we rely heavily on victim accounts and witness statements to prosecute cases involving sexual assault and domestic violence,” Foxx said at the time.
On Thursday, a pair of Baltimore women claimed at a New York press conference that Kelly preyed on them during the mid-1990s, when they were minors. They claimed Kelly entered the hotel suite he invited them to with his penis out and had sex with one of the women, Latresa Scaff, who was 16 at the time.
Kelly was also accused of secretly marrying the late singer Aaliyah in the mid-1990s, when she was 15. In recent years, Kelly has also been accused of controlling the lives of multiple women who live at his homes.
A campaign using the hashtag #MuteRKelly has called for boycotts of the singer’s music over the allegations surrounding him.
His longtime label Sony Music and its subsidiary brand RCA Records dropped him last month.
Avenatti said Friday he “will not rest” until Kelly’s “enablers” face justice as well — suggesting possible future lawsuits against Kelly’s music managers, agents and partners.
“Mr. Kelly did not do this alone,” he said. “He did so with the assistance of all of these folks. …They looked the other way while these young girls were taken advantage of instead of doing the right thing because they didn’t want to kill the golden goose.”
Avenatti claimed Kelly and his handlers “rigged” his 2008 trial by engaging in “obstruction of justice” that included “threats and intimidation of witnesses,” payment to witnesses to “shape their testimony” and the moving of one or more unidentified witnesses outside the reach of prosecutors.
That trial centered on a video sent to reporter Jim DeRogatis at the Chicago Sun-Times that appeared to show Kelly having sex with a teenage girl and urinating in her mouth.
Kelly was indicted on 21 counts of child pornography in that case but was acquitted after jurors decided they couldn’t identify the girl, who didn’t testify, with any certainty.
