The R&B singer will confront that question after a roughly five-week trial featuring 45 government witnesses that ended with the singer facing 10 years to life in prison. The remaining federal case in Chicago, where he is charged with child pornography and obstruction of justice, is just as perilous.
Decades after the first troubling allegations surfaced that R. Kelly had used his fame to have sex with teenage girls, and two years after a pair of indictments put him behind bars to await trial, the world of the Chicago-born superstar finally changed with his conviction Monday. And that means the verdict from a federal jury in Brooklyn could be the first domino to fall as the singer/songwriter who rose from the South Side confronts the massive amount of legal jeopardy he still faces in Chicago’s federal court, Cook County and in Minnesota. “Obviously, this is a huge setback for R. Kelly, and it changes the entire landscape for him,” Renato Mariotti, a former federal prosecutor, said. “At this point, he really has to be thinking about what I’ll call a ‘global resolution.’” In other words, how might the 54-year-old Kelly best deal with multiple criminal charges still hanging over his head? Kelly will confront that question after a roughly five-week trial featuring 45 government witnesses — including several victims — that ended with the singer facing 10 years to life in prison.
