R. Kelly, The R&B superstar was charged with 10 counts of aggravated criminal sexual abuse on Friday morning in Cook County, Illinois.
The Chicago Sun-Times confirmed the charges and reported that
arrest warrant was activated on Friday afternoon.
Celebrity lawyer Michael Avenatti said he turned over the tape to the Cook County State’s Attorney Office. “My client knows the identity of the girl and R. Kelly. He identified the two of them on the videotape,” Avenatti told CNN last week. “He worked for and has known R. Kelly for decades and he met the girl on a number of occasions.”
Moments before the Friday charges were announced, Avenatti ominously tweeted: ‘It’s over. The Attorney seemed to be sure of the evidence he has this time around.
Avenatti further said he has new video evidence of R. Kelly having sex with an underage girl and on Thursday, Feb. 14, 2019, he has turned over the video to prosecutors in Chicago. Avenatti clarified that the new video is not the same evidence used in Kelly’s 2008 trial, when he was acquitted on all charges of child pornography.
R Kelly is no stranger to sexual abuse scandal all his life.
He has faced nearly two decades of accusations of sexual abuse. And last Thursday, Cook County prosecutors reportedly received a 45-minute videotape that is said to show Kelly performing multiple sex acts with an underage girl, whom both Kelly and the girl describe on tape as being 14 years old.
The superstar has been able to get away with all these kind of accusations in the past even with evidence but lets hope justice is served this time around.
This year, there have been a documentary series on Surviving R. Kelly, aired on Lifetime and Amazon that quoted several of his real life victims. “He told me to perform sexual acts while his friends were in the backseat. It was like he owned me,” Lizzette Martinez said. “He stole my life from me.”
The music superstar has repeatedly denied all accusations against him.
“[Kelly] never knowingly had sex with an underage woman, he never force anyone to do anything, he never held anyone captive, he never abuse anyone,” his lawyer, Steve Greenberg, told The Associated Press last month.
Kelly, 52, has been accused by young, mostly black women of physically, mentally, and sexually abusing them.
In 2002, Kelly was indicted on 21 counts of child pornography in Illinois over another video made in the late 1990s allegedly showing him engaged in sex acts with a 13-year-old girl. Prosecutors and 15 witnesses, at the time claimed that the tape showed Kelly having sex with the niece of one of the singer’s protégée, R&B singer Sparkle. And after less than a day of deliberations, the jury acquitted him on all counts. (the girl and her parents did not testify).
In 2017, BuzzFeed published a report detailing the singer’s influence over these young women who were held involuntarily in what some called “a cult.” The report, cultivated from interviewed of three sets of parents, details how Kelly allegedly imprisoned these women in his Atlanta and Chicago residences and subjected them to physical, verbal, and sexual abuse.
Nothing came out of that too, just like the present Surviving R. Kelly Documentary series, looking at the details of those women accounts on the documentary you would just draw your own conclusions out of it, those women couldn’t just cook up such a detailed encounter.
SURVIVING R KELLY
A number of journalists and activists have worked diligently to unmask R. Kelly and to keep his many alleged crimes in conversation, Surviving R. Kelly is a singular and exhaustive project. It incorporates the voices of survivors, advocates, experts, musicians, reporters and cultural critics, as well as friends and family of R. Kelly.
It begins with his childhood, meticulously charting Kelly’s career while never losing sight of the young women and girls he systematically and continuously abused.
At some stage in December, Lifetime had to evacuate the screening of the Surviving R. Kelly
Docu-series after “several anonymous threats were called in,” according to the network. An NYPD spokesperson told CNN that an anonymous call was made, threatening to start shooting inside the theater unless the screening was called off. Andrea Kelly, R. Kelly’s ex-wife and a participant in the docuseries, responded to the threats. She told Rolling Stone, “It makes me smile because that lets me know we’re on the right track. We’re causing people to listen.”
The obvious and only question really left for the various interviewees and even general public viewing the show to reckon with is one of complicity. Why and how was this allowed to go on for so long in America? And can understanding our collective culpability help to ensure that it never happens again?
Is Kelly a Victim too
In an August 2012 interview, Kelly claimed to have been molested by “people in my family” from the age of 7 until he was 13 or 14. A visibly emotional Carey Kelly explains that, “I don’t think that he’s lying, because it happened to me.”
A clinical psychologist speaks broadly to the impact that molestation might have on a child—“Children might want to say, I want to be the one who’s in that power position. I never want to be a victim again.”
“There’s really no more powerful position in a sexual relationship than to be the abuser to the child.”
Hopefully, this case will bring out a lot of the hidden truth about this saga which has gone on for too long.
Kelly’s first date in court on the fresh charges is scheduled for March 8.