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Then, on Friday in Chicago, after weeks of renewed scrutiny, Kelly was indicted.
Authorities accused 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, whose real name is Robert Kelly, faces 10 of them.
“This was 30 years in the making,” said Jim DeRogatis, the music journalist who was among the first to document allegations against Kelly. The singer, 52, was tried on 14 counts of child pornography and ultimately acquitted in 2008.
But in the intervening years, the world around him has changed. The #MeToo movement has washed across the country. As the fallout from abuse by Catholic priests unspooled, statutes of limitations on the sexual acts involving children have been raised or, in states like Illinois, abolished. Women who were afraid to come forward or who were not believed are increasingly being heard.
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Foxx said the events related to Kelly’s charges spanned from 1998 to 2010. Three of the victims were between the ages of 13 and 16 at the time of the incidents.
Kelly is accused of ejaculating on one victim, identified by the initials L.C., in a forcible encounter, an attempted criminal sexual assault. Court documents said she reported the offense to law enforcement officials within two years of its occurrence.
Prosecutors said that Kelly had oral sex and intercourse with the other three victims, all of whom were under 17, too young to legally consent.
Kelly, who turned himself in to police in Chicago on Friday night, is due in court Saturday for a bail hearing. His lawyer, Steven Greenberg, has said his client denies any wrongdoing.
After his client surrendered, Greenberg spoke to reporters for several minutes, fiercely maintaining Kelly’s innocence and blasting the state’s attorney for what he characterized as succumbing to public pressure by bringing charges against him. At one point he claimed that all of the women accusing Kelly are lying.
“Mr. Kelly is strong, he’s got a lot of support and he’s going to be vindicated on all of these charges,” he said. “One by one, if it has to be.”
After so many years of accusations, Kelly became the focus of 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 dating back to the 1990s.
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 that Kelly and the girl refer to her age multiple times in the video, which is more than 40 minutes long. On Friday, Avenatti said the video depicted oral, vaginal and anal sex, and that Kelly urinates on the girl. At one point in the footage, Avenatti said, Kelly has the girl watch a pornographic video on a screen, which depicts Kelly with another young woman.
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.
“This may not be the only prosecution of Mr. Kelly, because we are aware of other open investigations in other jurisdictions,” Allred said Friday.
Allred said two of her clients had been interviewed by federal investigators in Brooklyn. Federal investigators in Manhattan were also looking at Kelly’s conduct, although the circumstances were not immediately clear.
“We’re glad to see the allegations against R. Kelly are being taken seriously and hope that these charges empower victims to come forward,” RAINN, the Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network, said in a statement. “The survivors who shared their stories showed admirable courage and strength.”
Despite being acquitted in 2008, allegations of sexual misconduct have followed Kelly for much of his career. More than 20 years ago, Vibe magazine questioned a marriage certificate that said singer Aaliyah was 18 when she and Kelly were wed. She was, in fact, 15 at the time and the marriage was annulled. Greenberg has said Kelly did not know she was underage at the time. Aaliyah died in a plane crash in 2001.
Now a legacy act selling concert tickets largely on the strength of his catalog, Kelly was a powerful hitmaker when he 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 continued to release hits as his lawyers filed motion after motion, delaying the trial for six years. The girl from the video never testified, and though 14 witnesses identified her, Kelly’s lawyers argued successfully that her identity could not be proven. He was acquitted on all 14 counts he faced.
In 2017, the allegations picked up again when DeRogatis, the music journalist, wrote articles for BuzzFeed News that described Kelly keeping women in a “cult,” in which he separated them from their families and exerted tremendous control over their lives.
Last year, the social media campaign #MuteRKelly gained momentum, seeking to put pressure on the companies involved with Kelly’s career, including streaming services Spotify and Apple Music; Ticketmaster, which sells tickets to his concerts; and RCA Records, a division of Sony Music that released his last four albums.
While Kelly seemed impervious to the accusations, things appeared to take a turn in January, after “Surviving R. Kelly” caused a stir. Law enforcement authorities in Illinois and Georgia, where he has lived, began looking into his conduct. And after tremendous public pressure from activists, Kelly was dropped by RCA, just two weeks after the program aired.
The fact that the alleged victim did not participate in Kelly’s 2008 trial was a significant problem for the prosecution, jurors said. “All of us felt the grayness of the case,” one juror told reporters at the time.
On Friday, Foxx read off the charges against Kelly at a news conference and left without taking questions.
DeRogatis was in the room. “The first girl, who I met,” he said, “it was 1991. She was 15. Thirty years the system has failed. I’d like to be optimistic today. I don’t know if I am.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.