What to Know
The musician faces charges of sex crimes and of working to obstruct an earlier investigation that resulted in his acquittal in a 2008 criminal trial.
R. Kelly, who was sentenced to 30 years in prison for racketeering and sex trafficking earlier this year, will stand trial again starting this week, beginning the next chapter of prosecutors’ efforts to hold him criminally responsible for allegations of sexual abuse dating back more than three decades.
The trial is in Chicago, the city Mr. Kelly long called home, and where he faced his first criminal trial in 2008.
This time, federal prosecutors are seeking to hold Mr. Kelly and his associates accountable for working to stymie the earlier trial, in which a jury acquitted Mr. Kelly of producing child sexual abuse imagery. They are accusing Mr. Kelly and a former employee who is also on trial, Derrel McDavid, of arranging hush money payments and seeking to conceal evidence that would have aided prosecutors when they were investigating the singer in the early 2000s.
Mr. Kelly, 55, will face charges that he coerced five minors into sex acts, and several charges related to producing child sexual abuse imagery. He and Mr. McDavid also face charges of receiving child sexual abuse imagery, during what prosecutors have described as a scheme to recover missing tapes of Mr. Kelly having sex with minors.
A third man — another former employee of Mr. Kelly’s, Milton Brown — is facing a related charge. All three men have pleaded not guilty.
The trial will be an emotional moment for many in Chicago who have witnessed Mr. Kelly’s rise from a child of the city to a pop and R&B star, then his fall after he was accused of luring underage girls into his orbit.
“Chicago has always struggled with this because he is local and we tend to go up for our locals,” said Mikki Kendall, a writer who grew up in the city and recalled, in the Lifetime documentary series “Surviving R. Kelly,” seeing the adult singer approaching teenage girls at a local McDonald’s. “There are people who are going to be very upset and will again try to insist that the girls are at fault, and there are going to be people — and I am one of them — who are going to say 59,000 times: He is a grown man preying on very young women and children.”
The first public disclosure of abuse allegations came in a 1996 lawsuit, and a steady drip of legal claims and articles followed over the next two decades. The renewed effort to prosecute Mr. Kelly came in 2019, after the Lifetime documentary broadcast accounts of women who described being abused and controlled by him, oftentimes when they were teenagers.