There's a report on the conclusion to the Federal trial for R&B producer and musician R. Kelly, according to the Associated Press.
Associated Press:
NEW YORK (AP) – R&B superstar R. Kelly was sentenced to prison for 30 years on Wednesday for using his fame to expose his young fans even children to a symbiosis of sexual abuse.
The songwriter and singer 55-year-old was found guilty of racketeering as well as sex trafficking in the last year during the trial that gave the accusers a voice who thought that their experiences were not being heard due to the fact that they are Black women.
U.S. District Judge Ann Donnelly issued the sentence after hearing from a number of survivors who reaffirmed how the sexism of Kelly reverberated throughout their lives.
The AP continues to say:
Kelly was who was born Robert Sylvester Kelly, used his “fame, money and popularity” to routinely “prey upon children and young women for his own sexual gratification,” the prosecution stated in a court document earlier in the month.
The allegations that Kelly was a victim of abuse among young girls started appearing in the media in the early 1990s. In 1997, he was sued by an individual who claimed sexual assault and battery when she was a minor and later was charged with criminal charges for child pornography related to another woman in Chicago. A jury in Chicago acquitted the defendant in 2008 and he settled the suit.
Kelly's lawyers had said that he shouldn't be sentenced to greater than 10 years of prison time because the traumatizing childhood he endured “involving severe, prolonged childhood sexual abuse, poverty, and violence.”
As an adult suffering from “literacy deficiencies,” the star was “repeatedly defrauded and financially abused, often by the people he paid to protect him,” his lawyers stated.
The report from the wire service reveals it is noted that Kelly did not speak to the judge or his victims when he was sentenced He is also facing accusations against him for “child pornography and obstruction of justice” in Chicago.
