Prosecutors drop R. Kelly’s tampering with child pornography case

CHICAGO – Prosecutors rested their case Tuesday at R. Kelly’s federal trial in Chicago after presenting two weeks of evidence and testimony in their effort to show that the singer enticed underage girls for sex, produced child pornography and successfully perjured his state court in 2008.

Among the last prosecution witnesses was a 42-year-old woman with the pseudonym “Niya”. She was the fourth accuser to testify against the Grammy Award-winning singer at the trial in Kelly’s hometown.

The centerpiece of the prosecution’s case was the testimony of a 37-year-old woman who used the pseudonym “Jane” and described Kelly raping her hundreds of times, starting in 1998, when she was 14 and Kelly was in his 30s.

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Jane’s testimony is vital to the prosecution, which accuses Kelly of rigging a child pornography trial in 2008 in which he was acquitted. She testified that Kelly and his associates threatened her and her parents and paid them to lie to a grand jury before trial.

Kelly’s legal team now gets a chance to attack the government’s case. His attorneys have not said whether Kelly will testify. Kelly, 55, did not testify at an earlier federal trial in New York, where a judge sentenced him in June to 30 years in prison on racketeering and sex-trafficking charges. A conviction in Chicago could add years to that sentence.

Closing arguments in the federal trial in Chicago are expected next week.

Kelly’s 2008 trial revolved around a video that prosecutors say shows him sexually assaulting Jane. She did not testify at that trial, but told jurors this month that she was the child in the video and Kelly was a grown man.

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Kelly sold millions of albums even after allegations of his abuse of young girls became public in the 1990s. Widespread outrage over his sexual misconduct emerged only after the fallout of #MeToo and the 2019 documentary series Surviving R. Kelly.

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Follow Michael Tarm on Twitter at https://twitter.com/mtarm. See AP’s complete coverage of the R. Kelly trial at https://apnews.com/hub/r-kelly.