R. Kelly’s lawyers say the imprisoned R&B singer was moved to solitary confinement after they alleged this week he’s the target of a prison murder plot — and Kelly has refused to eat the food offered since Tuesday afternoon because he’s afraid it might be poisoned.
“This is not done for protection,” attorney Beau Brindley wrote Thursday, complaining about Kelly’s new living conditions. “It is done for punishment.”
The remarks appear in a four-page document filed in Chicago’s federal court, seeking to bolster Kelly’s bid to be moved out of prison and into home detention.
“Mr. Kelly has spiders crawling over him as he tries to sleep,” Brindley wrote. “He is alone in the dark in miserable conditions. [Mr.] Kelly has not eaten since the afternoon of June 10. This is because the only food they will bring him comes from the very chow hall about which a prison official warned him.”
Afraid of the move, Kelly “pointed out that Jeffrey Epstein died in solitary confinement” and said “he would feel safer in his room with the door locked,” according to Brindley.
The singer also can’t take medicine on an empty stomach, the lawyer noted.
Kelly, 58, is being held in a medium-security prison facility in Butner, North Carolina, records show. He’s serving a 30-year sentence there for his 2021 racketeering and sex-crime conviction in New York.
Kelly is also serving a mostly simultaneous 20-year sentence for his 2022 child pornography conviction in Chicago. He’s not due out of prison until December 2045, when he would be nearing his 79th birthday.
U.S. District Judge Martha Pacold in Chicago has scheduled a hearing for June 20 in the wake of Kelly’s request for home detention. However, that hearing seems likely to revolve around jurisdictional issues, not the merits of Kelly’s claims.
Brindley launched a new legal assault on Kelly’s twin federal convictions this week, alleging federal prison officials enlisted a leader of the Aryan Brotherhood to kill Kelly to prevent the disclosure of damaging information.
To support that claim, Brindley filed a five-page declaration “signed, sworn and affirmed” by the inmate allegedly recruited to carry out the task, Mikeal Glenn Stine.
Brindley has said he’s also preparing a motion to undo Kelly’s convictions because of alleged government misconduct, and he’s appealed to President Donald Trump, who has made prolific use of his pardon power.
Federal prosecutors laid out Stine’s “stark” criminal history in a court filing earlier this year in Colorado. They wrote that he’s “spent the bulk of his life since 1980 imprisoned for one crime or another.”
Those crimes ranged from dealing marijuana to contempt of court, to grand theft, to bank robbery to a gang sexual assault of a cellmate, they explained. In Colorado, he’d also been convicted of threatening a federal judge and a prosecutor, allegedly saying he “would snap” the prosecutor’s neck if he could get his hands around it.