R. Kelly might spend additional 25 years in prison for his child pornography and enticement convictions

CHICAGO, Illinois — Federal prosecutors asked a judge on Thursday to give singer R. Kelly 25 more years in prison for his convictions for child pornography and enticing a child last year in Chicago. This would be on top of the 30 years he just started serving in a New York case.

If the judge agrees to both the 25-year sentence and another government request, Kelly won’t be able to get out of jail until he is around 100 years old. This is because Kelly’s Chicago sentence won’t start until the 30-year New York sentence is done.

In a sentencing recommendation filed before midnight Thursday in U.S. District Court in Chicago, prosecutors called Kelly’s behavior “sadistic” and called him a “serial sexual predator” with no remorse who “poses a serious danger to society.”

The 37-page government filing says, “The only way to make sure Kelly doesn’t break the law again is to put him in prison for the rest of his life.”

The Chicago court will decide Kelly’s sentence on Thursday of the following week.

Jennifer Bonjean, Kelly’s lawyer, said in a court filing last week that even with his current 30-year sentence in New York, “Kelly would have to beat all statistical odds to get out of prison alive.” She showed that the average age of death for prisoners is 64.

She suggested a sentence of about 10 years, which was on the low end of the sentencing guidelines range, and said it should be served at the same time as the sentence in New York.

Bonjean said that Kelly, who is black, was singled out for behavior that white rock stars have been able to get away with for decades.

She wrote, “None have been charged, and none will die in prison.”

In the Chicago case, the prosecutors agreed that a 25-year sentence would be longer than what even the sentencing guidelines recommend. But they said it was right to give him a long sentence and tell him to serve it only after he did his time in New York.

“Given how bad Kelly’s actions were, a consecutive sentence makes a lot of sense,” the filing said. “Kelly abused children sexually on purpose and a lot of times.”

At the singer’s trial in Chicago last year, the jury found her guilty on six of the 13 charges. But the government couldn’t prove that Kelly and his business manager at the time rigged his state trial for child pornography in 2008.

Both of Kelly’s co-defendants, including Derrel McDavid, her longtime business manager, were cleared of all charges.

Kelly, who was born Robert Sylvester Kelly in Chicago, went from being poor to a big star thanks to songs like “I Believe I Can Fly” and “Bump n’ Grind.”

The Grammy Award winner went to trial in 2008, but it wasn’t until Lifetime’s 2019 documentary series “Surviving R. Kelly,” which included interviews with his accusers, that federal and new state charges were brought against him.

On the advice of Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx, an Illinois judge dropped sex abuse charges against the state before a trial in January. Foxx said she didn’t mind dropping the case because Kelly’s federal convictions would put him in jail for decades.

At Kelly’s federal trial in Chicago, the prosecutors said he was a master manipulator who used his fame and money to lure in star-struck fans, sexually abuse them, and then throw them away.

After deliberating for two days, the jury found Kelly guilty of three counts of both making child pornography and trying to get minors to have sex. However, they found him not guilty of obstructing justice, one count of making child porn, and three counts of receiving child porn.

A federal judge in New York had given Kelly 30 years in prison for racketeering and sex trafficking a few months before the Chicago verdict. Just based on that sentence, he wouldn’t be able to get out of jail until he was about 80.

Even if Kelly got time off for being good, he wouldn’t be able to get out of jail until 2066, 25 years after the New York sentence. This is what the government said in a filing on Thursday.

Judge Harry Leinenweber in Chicago will decide the most important question, which is whether Kelly will serve his sentence at the same time as the sentence in New York or after it.

Kelly’s lawyers are trying to overturn his convictions in both New York and Chicago. Prosecutors sometimes try to get long sentences for people who were convicted at earlier trials. This is so that even if some of their convictions are later overturned, they will still have to serve some time in prison.

Bonjean said that Kelly’s life traumas, like being abused as a child and not being able to read or write as an adult, meant that she should get a lighter sentence.

Kelly “is not a bad monster, but a complicated (and definitely troubled) person who had to deal with a lot of hard things as a child that shaped his life as an adult,” she said.

She said that it should also be taken into account that the things he was found guilty of happened decades ago.

She said that Kelly wasn’t a child in the late 1990s, but he also wasn’t a middle-aged man like he was when he was charged in 2019. “When Kelly was in his late 20s, he was a broken man.”

She also said that Kelly’s legal problems have already cost him a lot, both in terms of money and time. She said that he was once worth close to $1 billion, but that he is now “poor.”