A resounding trial opens this Monday in New York.

R. Kelly, a former R'n'B star in the 1990s, will be tried in Brooklyn federal court on various counts, including underage sexual exploitation, extortion, kidnapping, bribery and forced labor.

Charges for which the singer pleaded not guilty.

As RFI reports, he faces up to twenty years in prison.

And that's just the beginning.

This first trial should be followed soon by others, including one in Chicago in the fall, where the 54-year-old musician should be tried for similar facts.

It was in this state of Illinois, where he is from, that he was jailed in 2019 for aggravated sexual abuse of four women between 1998 and 2010. Last June, he was transferred to a Brooklyn prison. in view of his New York trial, delayed for a year because of the pandemic.

At the heart of these multiple cases?

More than 25 years of suspicion and accusations of child pornography, sexual relations with minors, sexual violence and forcible confinement.

He is suspected in particular of having created around him a real sexual sect, unveiled at the end of the 2010s by an investigation and a documentary.

Twenty years of investigation

One of the first cases dates back to the early 2000s, when R. Kelly is still surfing the worldwide success of

I Believe I Can Fly

(three Grammy Awards in 1998). Jim DeRogatis, a reporter for the 

Chicago-Sun Times

, reveals that he received videos by anonymous mail showing the singer having sex with young girls. Indicted for child pornography in 2002, R. Kelly is finally acquitted six years later, the investigation not allowing to define the age of one of the young girls. As the BBC specifies, other similar accusations target the singer at this time, dropped for lack of sufficient evidence.

It was almost ten years later that new charges revived the case in earnest. For the BuzzFeed site this time, Jim DeRogatis unveils in July 2017 a substantial and damning investigation on the singer, accusing him of having created a sex sect and of kidnapping six women in different properties in the suburbs of Atlanta and Chicago. "He controls all aspects of their life: he tells them what to eat, wear, when to wash, sleep, and how to have sex when he films them," he wrote in particular. Revelations that come a few months before the Weinstein affair.

Finally, two years later, Lifetime airs the documentary series 

Surviving R. Kelly,

which brings together more than 50 testimonies from relatives who confirm all the accusations of forcible confinement and sexual violence.

The program then creates a real shock wave.

Serial indictments

In February 2019, Chicago prosecutors indicted him for aggravated sexual abuse of four women between 1998 and 2010, the youngest of whom was 14 years old at the time of the facts.

Seven months later, still in Illinois, federal prosecutors indict him for child pornography and incitement of a minor to sexual acts, accusing him in particular of having filmed his antics with young girls and bought the silence of potential witnesses to obtain his acquittal during his first trial in 2008, for child pornography.

In New York, the musician is accused of having abused six women whose identities have not been released. But many consider that one of the victims, named Jane Doe # 1 in the file, was actually singer Aaliyah, who died in a 2001 plane crash at age 22. The indictment indeed accuses R. Kelly of having bribed an official of the State of Illinois in 1994 to obtain false documents and marry a minor. An accusation that refers to the singer's marriage, finally canceled, with the young R & B star, then 15 years old.

The indictment details sordid facts: R. Kelly ran a network that recruited and groomed young girls to have sex with him, locking them in their hotel rooms when he was on tour, asking them to wear loose clothes when they weren't with him, to “keep your head down” and call him “daddy”.

"Undo the nesting doll"

In Chicago as in New York, federal judges refused his release on bail, citing a risk of flight, witness tampering or the danger posed by the singer. R. Kelly, who also faces a legal front in the state of Minnesota, for similar facts, has always denied the charges. "Whether it is old rumors, new rumors, future rumors, it is false," he assured in an interview with CBS, before the federal indictments.

For lawyer Gloria Allred, who represents three of the victims in the New York trial, "the charges are very powerful, they stir a lot" and "to put it mildly, this is going to be a real challenge for the defense".

Kenyette Barnes, co-founder of the “MuteRKelly” movement, is optimistic about a conviction that will give the alleged victims a chance to start “healing”.

Unlike 2008, when he was acquitted, "there is this concerted effort to undo the nesting doll represented by Robert Kelly," she told AFP.

“The time has come for the survivors (…) He harmed too many young women and girls throughout his life, and avoided accountability.

And it is time for this reign to end.

"

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