)
Then, on Friday in Chicago, Kelly was charged.
Authorities are accusing him of aggravated criminal sexual abuse involving four victims, three of whom were underage, according to the Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx. Aggravated criminal sexual abuse can carry a sentence of three to seven years in prison for each count. Kelly faces 10 of them.
Foxx said the events occurred between 1998 and 2010. Kelly was accused of ejaculating on a fourth victim, identified by the initials L.C., during an attempted criminal sexual assault.
Kelly was arrested on child pornography charges in 2002 over a tape prosecutors said showed him having sex with and urinating on an underage girl. He was acquitted on all 14 counts he faced in the case, in 2008.
)
)
)
Kelly came under renewed scrutiny after the documentary “Surviving R. Kelly” was broadcast on Lifetime in January. The six-part series included testimony from several women who accused the singer of abuse. Celebrity lawyer Michael Avenatti said last week that he had obtained a video showing Kelly having sex with a 14-year-old girl and had given it to the Cook County state’s attorney’s office in Chicago. He has said Kelly and the girl refer to her age multiple times in the video.
On Thursday, two additional women came forward at a news conference in New York organized by their lawyer, Gloria Allred, to accuse Kelly of sexual abuse and misconduct when they were minors. The women, Latresa Scaff, 40, and Rochelle Washington, 39, said they met the singer after a concert in the mid-1990s when they were 16 and 15; they said he asked for a threesome and had sex with Scaff.
Steven Greenberg, Kelly’s lawyer, did not immediately respond to a request for comment, but he has said that Kelly “denies that he has engaged in any illegal conduct, of any kind whatsoever.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.