CHICAGO: A former marketing agent for R. Kelly testified Tuesday that the singer offered him $1 million to find a VHS tape featuring Kelly as prosecutors tried to persuade a jury that Kelly was desperate to retrieve the missing recording, knowing it could put him in danger. legal if he did. fell into the hands of law enforcement.
Based on that recording, prosecutors say that shows the R&B star sexually abusing a 14-year-old girl, Kelly faces charges, including producing child pornography. He is also accused of rigging his 2008 state child pornography trial by threatening witnesses and trying to hide video evidence.
Charles Freeman testified Tuesday that Kelly approached him in 2001, asking him to find the recording. Freeman, a 52-year-old man from Kansas City, also explained how he pressured Kelly and his associates for years to pay him the total million dollars after Freeman found and returned the tape.
Freeman told jurors he didn’t know the contents of the video until after he retrieved it from home in Atlanta in 2001 and then slipped it into a VHS player at a friend’s house later that day.
“I observed Robert Kelly with a young lady having sex,” he said.
When a prosecutor asked Freeman, who testified Tuesday under an immunity agreement, why it took him nearly two decades to turn the recording over to the police and other recordings of child phonography tied to Kelly, Freeman responded: “Because the police weren’t going to pay me a million dollars.”
A former marketing agent for R. Kelly testified Tuesday that the singer offered him $1 million to find a VHS tape featuring Kelly as prosecutors tried to persuade a jury that Kelly was desperate to retrieve the missing recording, knowing it could put him in danger. legal if he did. fell into the hands of law enforcement.
Based on that recording, prosecutors say that shows the R&B star sexually abusing a 14-year-old girl, Kelly faces charges, including producing child pornography. He is also accused of rigging his 2008 state child pornography trial by threatening witnesses and trying to hide video evidence.
Charles Freeman testified Tuesday that Kelly approached him in 2001, asking him to find the recording. Freeman, a 52-year-old man from Kansas City, also explained how he pressured Kelly and his associates for years to pay him the total million dollars after Freeman found and returned the tape.
Kelly, 55, is already serving a 30-year sentence imposed by a federal judge in New York in June for his 2021 convictions on racketeering and sex trafficking charges. If convicted in Chicago, he could see years added to that sentence.
At his 2008 trial, in which Kelly was ultimately acquitted, state prosecutors described Kelly dragging a duffel bag full of his homemade child pornography tapes everywhere. Despite Kelly’s efforts in the 1990s to keep them close, some leaked or were stolen by disaffected workers or friends, prosecutors said.
After Kelly was acquitted in 2008, some jurors told reporters they had no choice but to find Kelly not guilty because the girl, then in her 20s, did not take the stand to confirm that she was the one appearing. in the video. Last week she testified at the federal trial in Chicago, saying she was a minor in the video and Kelly was the adult male.