R. Kelly loses appeal of NYC sex trafficking and racketeering case

Yahoo

12-02-2025

A federal appeals court has rejected fallen R&B star R. Kelly's bid to overturn his New York sex trafficking and racketeering conviction.
Kelly, 58, who was sentenced to 30 years in prison in June 2022 on racketeering and sex trafficking charges, argued through his attorneys that he didn't run a racketeering enterprise because his employees didn't know the age of his young victims and therefore weren't acting with criminal intent.
In an 85-page decision Wednesday, the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals rejected that argument and kept the guilty verdict against the 'I Believe I Can Fly' singer intact.
A Brooklyn Federal Court jury found him guilty in September 2021of one racketeering count and eight Mann Act counts, after a blockbuster trial with testimony from 40 witnesses and 11 accusers. The Mann Act criminalizes transporting people across state lines for immoral purposes.
'The record is replete with evidence that Kelly was able to commit the predicate acts because he was the head of a close-knit group of associates and he controlled the affairs of the enterprise,' Judge Denny Chin wrote, explaining the three-judge panel's decision. 'For instance, members of Kelly's entourage participated directly in a predicate act when they devised a plan for Kelly to marry Aaliyah when she was underage.'
Kelly's secret and illegal marriage to late R&B teen phenom Aaliyah in 1994, when she was 15 and he was 27, unnerved some of his staunchest allies.
Kelly's inner circle played a key role in recruiting his victims and keeping them quiet and under his thumb, helping enforce the singer's strict rules, and standing guard when Kelly made them stay in a room or a bus for hours or days, Chin wrote in the majority decision.
They knew, or turned a blind eye to the fact that the young women were minors, and knew Kelly had a sexually-transmitted disease.
In his appeal, Kelly also tried to argue that four of the jurors were biased against him because of the publicity surrounding the case, pointing out that two jurors admitted they'd watched the 2019 documentary, 'Surviving R. Kelly.'
The appeals panel ruled, though, that Brooklyn Federal Court Judge Ann Donnelly correctly determined 'after giving each side an opportunity to request further questioning, that each juror could be impartial when deciding the case.'
Kelly's career was already in decline, but the documentary burned what was left of his reputation to the ground and sped his downfall. It featured numerous women describing their abusive relationships with the singer over decades. He was charged with sex crimes in Brooklyn, Illinois and Minnesota later that year.
In a dissenting opinion, one of the three judges, Richard Sullivan, said the conviction should stand but agreed with Kelly that one of his victims, 'Jane,' should have only been reimbursed for a lifetime supply of generic herpes medication, not the more expensive brand name Valtrex.
Jane testified that the singer pulled her into his orbit at age 17 and subjected her to years of abuse.
Kelly's lawyer, Jennifer Bonjean, maintains that the $270,000 lifetime price tag of the Valtrex amounts to a 'windfall' meant to influence her testimony.
'While we are disappointed that the Second Circuit affirmed Mr. Kelly's convictions, we believe the United States Supreme Court will be interested in reviewing this unprecedented opinion that gives the government limitless discretion to apply the RICO statute to situations absurdly remote from statute's intent,' Bonjean said of the appeals court's decision. 'The statute was intended to punish organized crime – not individual conduct.'
In October, the Supreme Court rejected Kelly's appeal of his conviction and 20-year sentence for child sex crimes in Chicago.
Kelly has lost every appeal in the Chicago case since he was convicted in September 2022 on three counts of producing child sexual abuse images and three counts of enticing minors for sex.