Twenty-three years after she wound up in the middle of a maelstrom involving R&B superstar R. Kelly, the singer’s lawyers are putting a key witness against him at the center of his new fight for freedom.
Seeking a new trial Friday from U.S. District Judge Martha Pacold, Kelly’s attorneys alleged that federal authorities secured the woman’s testimony through threats and promises. In court, the woman has been referred to as “Jane.”
Now, Kelly’s lawyers say “the defense will call Jane to the witness stand.”
Whether that happens remains to be seen. Kelly has made headlines over the last two weeks by claiming he’s the target of a murder plot hatched by prison officials. Along the way, his lawyers have appealed to President Donald Trump for help.
But he’s made little progress so far. Kelly, 58, remains locked up in a North Carolina prison. He’s not due out until December 2045. In response to Kelly’s recent filings, a prosecutor told Pacold she shouldn’t let Kelly turn her docket “into a grocery store checkout aisle tabloid.”
And as for Pacold, she denied an initial motion to move Kelly to home detention Thursday, finding that she didn’t have the authority to address it.
Kelly attorney Beau Brindley followed up with a new motion Friday. In it, he sought a new trial and made allegations about Jane’s testimony during Kelly’s 2022 trial. A lawyer who once represented Jane did not immediately respond to inquiries from the Chicago Sun-Times.
The U.S. attorney’s office declined to comment.
Even if Kelly were to successfully undo his Chicago conviction, it would not be enough to set him free. He’s also serving time for a racketeering and sex-crime conviction in New York.
Jurors in Kelly’s Chicago trial found in 2022 that the singer sexually had abused Jane when she was a teenager, and on camera, after she asked him to be her godfather.
But that wasn’t the first time Kelly faced trial over his abuse of Jane. He also went to trial in 2008, in state court in Cook County. That was after the Chicago Sun-Times in 2002 received a video of Kelly abusing Jane.
Jane refused to testify during that 2008 trial. So the jurors acquitted Kelly and pointed to her absence on the witness stand.
Kelly then found himself under federal indictment in July 2019, following release of the Lifetime docuseries “Surviving R. Kelly.” During a hearing that summer in Chicago, a prosecutor announced that Jane had “gone on record” despite her absence from the 2008 trial.
Then, Jane took the stand during Kelly’s 2022 trial. She detailed Kelly’s abuse and told the jury that she’d become “exhausted with living with his lies.”
She said Kelly abused her “uncountable … hundreds” of times. She also confirmed that three videos at issue in the trial depicted Kelly sexually abusing her when she was 14 and he was in his 30s.
Still, Brindley wrote in his motion Friday that Jane “did not independently come forward and change her story. She did not participate in any aspect of ‘Surviving R. Kelly.’ She did not independently assert that she was the person depicted in any videotape.
“What changed was the tactics that prosecutors were willing to use to get her to change her story,” he added.