R Kelly has been rushed to hospital after a near-fatal overdose while serving 30 years in a North Carolina prison.
The Ignition singer, real name Robert Sylvester Kelly, is currently serving a 30-year sentence in prison for sex trafficking and racketeering.
A recent filing seen by TMZ from the 58-year-old singer’s lawyer, Beau Brindley, revealed that the artist was placed in isolation on June 10 with his anxiety medication.
He was then given further medication from prison staff, later losing consciousness three days later.
He was taken to Duke University Hospital on June 13 and was taken back to his cell after two days of observation.
Brindley has claimed that the officers intentionally ‘gave him an amount of medicine that could have killed him.’
He added: ‘This was no mistake. It was a dose that jeopardised his life and could have ended it.
Brindley has now filed an emergency motion for Kelly’s early release from prison. This marks his third attempt to get his client out of prison.
Kelly was arrested in 2019, with accusations of sexual abuse for incidents spanning from 1991 to 2018.
In September 2022, he was convicted of six out of 13 charges brought against him in Chicago, including three counts of coercing minors into sexual activity and three of producing sex tapes involving a minor.
As of 2023, he was sentenced to a 31-year combined sentence. This was 20 years in prison for child sex crimes in Chicago while already serving a 30-year prison sentence over sex trafficking and racketeering charges in New York.
The judge ruled he could serve 19 years at the same time, meaning the child sex crimes only added one year to his existing sentence.
The news of Kelly’s overdose comes just a week after his lawyers accused prison officials of ‘soliciting an inmate to kill him’.
In a filing seen by Variety, his attorney, Beau B. Brindley, claimed that the team had ‘explicit evidence that officials solicited an inmate to murder him while in custody’.
His counsel provided a sworn declaration from Mikeal Glenn Stine, a terminally ill inmate, who said that officials ‘offered him freedom in his final days in exchange for Kelly’s murder’.
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