A top Chicago prosecutor said her office will be dropping s*xual abuse charges against R. Kelly because the singer is already likely to spend the rest of his life in prison following his convictions in federal courts.
Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx said she will ask a judge on Tuesday to dismiss charges of aggravated criminal s*xual assault and aggravated criminal s*xual abuse that her office filed against Kelly in 2019.
Kelly, whose full name is Robert Sylvester Kelly, was convicted of s*x trafficking and racketeering by a New York federal court in 2021, and later sentenced to 30 years in prison. After a separate trial in Illinois, a federal jury found Kelly guilty in September of three counts of coercing minors into s*xual activity and three counts of producing s*x tapes involving a minor. His sentencing in that case is expected next month, and he faces a minimum of 10 to 90 years in prison, according to prosecutors there.
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Under these conditions, and facing what she described as “limited” resources, Foxx on Monday said she made the decision to drop her office’s charges against Kelly, and to instead focus on finding “justice for other victims of s*xual abuse.”
“Mr. Kelly is potentially looking at … never walking out of prison again for the crimes that he’s committed,” Foxx said at a news conference. “We believe that justice has been served.”
A lawyer representing Kelly, Jennifer Bonjean, told the Associated Press she was “pleased” with the prosecutors’ decision. “He only has one life to give. So I don’t know how many sentences upon sentences would satisfy people,” Bonjean added.
Kelly is being held in the Metropolitan Correctional Center in Chicago, records show.
The move to drop state charges in Illinois is the latest development in a years-long legal battle to hold Kelly accountable for what prosecutors have described as his decades-long s*xual and physical abuse of women and girls. Over the course of Kelly’s federal trial in New York, 11 accusers testified against him, and some 50 witnesses provided evidence. Kelly has denied the allegations and said he plans to appeal his conviction.
The Cook County prosecutors publicly called for any victims to come forward, and in building their case, relied on the testimony of three accusers — two of whom were minors when they said Kelly repeatedly had s*x with them — and the testimony of a witness who gave the State’s Attorney Office a video said to have shown Kelly having s*x with a 14-year-old girl.
On Monday, Foxx — who has said that she is a survivor of s*xual assault — praised the accusers’ “courage” in coming forward with their stories, and acknowledged that her decision to drop the charges against Kelly “may be disappointing” to “those seeking to have their day in court here, in Illinois.”
Dropping the charges does not mean prosecutors view the accusers’ testimony as any less “credible,” Foxx said. “Sometimes, justice is served — even when there is no conviction,” she added. But she acknowledged that while some of the accusers were satisfied with the outcome, others were not.
The Cook County State’s Attorney Office filed its indictment against Kelly in 2019, after the release of the Lifetime documentary “Surviving R. Kelly,” which featured several of his accusers. But the allegations had been an open secret long before that, according to various news investigations, including from the Chicago Sun-Times. In 2008, Kelly was acquitted of child-pornography crimes.
The Washington Post reported in 2018 that “for more than two decades, the recording industry turned a blind eye to Kelly’s behavior as his career continued to thrive and he was afforded every luxury of a chart-topping superstar.”
Kelly still faces prostitution charges in Hennepin County, Minn. — but, like the Cook County case, the federal trials against Kelly have taken precedence.
