R. Kelly was a predator who destroyed the lives of the people around him and capitalized on his fame to prey on underage girls and boys and on women, a federal prosector said on Wednesday, as Mr. Kelly’s long-awaited criminal trial in Brooklyn neared its conclusion.
The prosecution’s closing argument, delivered by Elizabeth Geddes, will continue Thursday as the government seeks to convince the jury that Mr. Kelly was not only sexually and physically abusive, but used an extensive system of control and a network of associates to entrap people for sex and keep them from speaking out or going public with their accusations.
Mr. Kelly, once one of the brightest stars in R&B music, “used lies, manipulation, threats and physical abuse to dominate his victims,” Ms. Geddes said, adding that his immense wealth and fame allowed him to “hide in plain sight.”
Ms. Geddes’s closing arguments on Wednesday spanned three hours and illustrated the expansive breadth of the prosecution’s case against the singer — and the steep challenge his defense team has faced in the trial.
Mr. Kelly faces one count of racketeering, a charge that is built around 14 underlying crimes that prosecutors say he committed as part of the criminal scheme he led for decades. But the charge itself only requires that two of those crimes be proven.
In addition to the racketeering charge, Mr. Kelly is accused of eight violations of the Mann Act, a law barring sex trafficking across state lines. Mr. Kelly, 54, has pleaded not guilty and has long denied the accusations against him.
Armed with a large blackboard that showed Mr. Kelly near the center, surrounded by a network of associates, Ms. Geddes said that the singer’s inner circle and employees “served as enablers for his criminal conduct.”
She portrayed the people behind the music business that propelled Mr. Kelly to multiplatinum international stardom as the same group that offered condoms to his visitors and concocted a plot to marry Mr. Kelly to the singer Aaliyah when she was 15 and he feared she was pregnant.
“When someone commits a crime as part of a group, he’s more powerful — more dangerous,” Ms. Geddes said. “Without his inner circle, the defendant could not have carried out the crimes he carried out for as long as he did.”
Mr. Kelly’s trial has been years in the making. Allegations of sexual misconduct trailed the singer for years, even at the peak of his stardom. After he was finally arrested in 2019, the pandemic delayed his trial for more than a year. During that time, some of the singer’s allies were accused of using arson, bribery and other intimidation tactics to silence potential witnesses.
During the first portion of her closing arguments, Ms. Geddes walked through allegations related to three of the six women at the center of the case. Many of Mr. Kelly’s accusers over the years have been aspiring singers, lured by his fame and the promise of career boosts, but then exploited by the superstar, she said.
They included one woman who worked at a radio station and testified that she was thrilled when she was offered the opportunity to interview Mr. Kelly. But Ms. Geddes revisited her accounts with jurors, recalling that she said she was imprisoned at his Chicago home and raped in her sleep.
“When she arrived in Chicago, it wasn’t at all like she imagined,” Ms. Geddes told jurors. “Her big break had turned into her nightmare.”
After a five-week trial that included searing accusations of physical, sexual and emotional abuse against the superstar R&B singer R. Kelly, prosecutors began to offer their closing argument on Wednesday.
Although accusations of sexual misconduct have trailed Mr. Kelly for decades, the New York case is only the second to result in a criminal trial. (He was acquitted of a child pornography charge in 2008.)
The federal prosecutors in Brooklyn have constructed a sweeping racketeering case, with evidence that extends from recent years back to the early 1990s that seeks to portray the singer as the kingpin of a decades-long criminal enterprise that recruited women and girls for sex. Mr. Kelly is also charged with eight violations of the Mann Act, an interstate anti-sex trafficking law.
Mr. Kelly has pleaded not guilty to all charges.
Here are some of the most significant moments in the case and the trial:
Federal charges were first brought against Mr. Kelly in July 2019: More charges were filed within months, including allegations by a woman who had previously defended the singer. She testified under a pseudonym at the trial.
The pandemic delayed the trial for more than a year: Amid the wait, some of the singer’s allies were accused of using arson, bribery and other intimidation tactics to silence witnesses who were expected to testify.
The trial began on Aug. 18 with opening statements: Prosecutors said the singer “used every trick in the predator handbook” to mislead his accusers and their families. His lawyers argued that the accusers’ accounts would fall apart under scrutiny.
The 20th anniversary of the death of the R&B singer Aaliyah fell during the trial’s second week: Mr. Kelly’s illegal marriage to Aaliyah when she was 15 is central to the government’s case. Among the girls that prosecutors say he abused, she was the youngest.
The prosecution rested this week: After 45 witnesses testified for the government, Mr. Kelly’s lawyers offered their own smaller group of witnesses over two days. Observers watched closely to see whether a girlfriend of the singer who has recently expressed support for him would testify, but she was not called to the stand.
R. Kelly’s defense team rested its case Wednesday morning, but it remains unknown when a verdict might be reached in the singer’s long-awaited sex-trafficking and racketeering trial.
Closing arguments began Wednesday afternoon, starting with the prosecution team from the U.S. attorney’s office in Brooklyn, but it could be at least another day before the jury begins deliberations. Closing arguments in federal trials can run long; neither side has offered a ballpark estimate of how much time they need, but each could take hours, followed by rebuttals.
For prosecutors, closings are a chance to pull together weeks of witness testimony into a coherent narrative, and to argue that the evidence they have presented points in only one logical direction: guilt.
Mr. Kelly’s lawyers, in turn, will present their own narrative, revisiting apparent holes and inconsistencies in witness testimony, casting doubt on Mr. Kelly’s accusers’ motives, and trying to undermine the government’s case.
After the closings, U.S. District Judge Ann M. Donnelly will instruct the jury in how they are to deliberate on the nine counts Mr. Kelly is charged with — one racketeering count and eight counts of violating the Mann Act, an anti-sex trafficking statute.
Jury instructions may seem dry, but the judge’s words to the jury as she gives them the case are important, and they are often carefully litigated. For example, in recent days, R. Kelly’s lawyers and federal prosecutors have gone back and forth in court filings about how they would like Judge Donnelly to explain the nuances of the racketeering charge, and possible defenses to claims of Mr. Kelly’s abuse of underage girls.
Judge Donnelly has said she expects the jury to have the case by the end of the week.
After that, it is anybody’s guess. Old courthouse “wisdom” sometimes holds that long trials lead to long jury deliberations, but in at least one recent case in Brooklyn federal court, that did not happen: The 2019 racketeering and sex-trafficking trial of Keith Raniere, founder of the Nxivm sex cult, lasted six weeks — and the jury found him guilty in less than a day.
Courthouse gadflies also like to say that the longer deliberations stretch out, the better the outlook for defendants.
No matter the outcome of his federal trial in Brooklyn, R. Kelly still faces state and federal indictments in two other states, all stemming from what prosecutors describe as the R&B star’s sexual abuse of women and underage girls.
Federal prosecutors in Chicago hit Mr. Kelly in July 2019 with child pornography and obstruction charges. That trial has been pushed back several times because of the pandemic, and to allow Mr. Kelly’s Brooklyn trial to go first.
In February 2019, months before federal charges were announced, the Cook County state’s attorney indicted Mr. Kelly on aggravated criminal sexual abuse charges involving four victims, three of whom were underage at the time. Mr. Kelly has denied the allegations.
The state trial, a date for which has not been set, would be Mr. Kelly’s second criminal trial in Cook County — in 2008, he was acquitted on 14 counts of child pornography charges.
In Minnesota, Mr. Kelly was charged in August 2019 with engaging in prostitution with a minor. The following month, a Minneapolis judge issued an arrest warrant for Mr. Kelly after he failed to show up for a court hearing there. Prosecutors there said at the time that they weren’t likely to get access to Mr. Kelly until the Chicago charges were resolved, according to local news reports.