According to testimony given in court, R Kelly spent hundreds of thousands of dollars in an effort to recover child pornographic recordings that are said to have vanished in the early 2000s.
According to the prosecution, the disgraced musician and members of his inner circle spent a significant amount of money trying to locate the missing tapes.
An IRS agent went through payments check by check in testimony heard at the trial in Chicago on Monday.
One of his accusers’ mother testified in court about how the singer confronted her and her husband and left them scared for their lives.
She informed the jury that one of the reasons she and her husband felt intimidated by Kelly if they disclosed the truth about lying to a state grand jury 20 years earlier.
Under the alias “Susan,” she described how, in the early 2000s, she and her husband approached Kelly at a hotel over concerns that he might be torturing their daughter.
She claimed that when the singer said, “You are with us or against us,” they were taken aback.
She said she took those words to mean ‘that they were going to harm us if we didn’t do what they wanted us to do.’
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She claimed that Kelly and a companion gave them instructions that included lying and saying their daughter wasn’t in a child pornographic movie and that they needed to leave the nation right away for a few weeks.
She admitted to the jury, “We were very, extremely scared.”
Later, she explained that she had lied to the grand jury because “we were intimidated and we feared for our lives.”
She added that she was concerned for the welfare of her daughter, who had previously informed her parents that if they didn’t comply with Kelly’s request, she may commit suicide.
Kelly, 55, is facing allegations in his hometown of producing child pornography, soliciting young girls for sex, and obstructing justice after successfully rigging his 2008 state court child pornography trial, where he was found not guilty.
A federal court in New York sentenced Kelly to 30 years in prison in June for his 2021 convictions on charges of racketeering and sex trafficking. Kelly is already facing this sentence.
As the trial got underway last week, “Jane,” Susan’s daughter, was one of the first witnesses for the prosecution.
Prior to the 2008 trial, Jane said she had lied to the same grand jury by claiming not to be the 14-year-old girl on a video with Kelly. She admitted to this to the jury.
Jane, who is now 37, revealed to the jury last week that Kelly had actually violated her sexually hundreds of times before she became 18 years old.
Susan was frequently asked by Kelly’s attorney Jennifer Bonjean during a cross-examination on Monday if she honestly believed Kelly or his accomplices posed a threat to her life.
“You weren’t genuinely threatened, was there?” Bonjean enquired. Yes, they did, Susan said in response.
In addition, Bonjean questioned why Susan and her family continued to socialise with Kelly for the following 20 years if she felt so frightened by her.
She replied that, for a time, Kelly was their only source of money, with her musician husband getting paid to work on Kelly albums.
She added that if they severed relations with Kelly, she was concerned for Jane’s welfare. She informed the jury that Jane’s father’s husband passed away last year.
Susan’s testimony that she lied to the Illinois grand jury was underlined by Bonjean during her cross, who questioned whether Susan was “speaking the truth now.” Susan claimed to be.
