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Artist News Legal
Cook County State Attorney drops charges against already jailed R Kelly
By Chris Cooke | Published on Tuesday 31 January 2023
The State Attorney of Cook County in the US state of Illinois, Kim Foxx, yesterday announced that her office is dropping the charges it previously filed against R Kelly, concluding that the prosecution isn’t necessary given that the musician has already been convicted of similar crimes in the federal courts of both Illinois and New York.
Kelly faced charges in multiple US jurisdictions following the broadcast of the documentary ‘Surviving R Kelly’ in 2019. That programme, of course, put the spotlight on the many allegations of sexual abuse that had been made against the star in the preceding decades.
The first case to get to court, in 2021, was in New York, where Kelly was found guilty of building and running a criminal enterprise in order to access and abuse women and teenagers.
Then last year, Kelly was found guilty in the federal court in his home city of Chicago of three charges of enticing minors to engage in criminal sexual activity and three more in relation to his filming of that sexual abuse of children.
Kelly was sentenced to 30 years in jail in relation to the New York conviction. Sentencing in the Chicago case has not yet happened, but he faces additional jail time of between ten and 90 years in connection to those crimes.
With that in mind, Foxx has concluded that justice has already been served and pursuing further action against the musician is not the best use of resources.
Foxx’s office said in a statement yesterday that it had interviewed many of Kelly’s victims and hundreds of witnesses in Chicago, Atlanta and New York as part of its investigation into the many allegations that were made against Kelly, adding that that work supported prosecutors working on the New York and Chicago trials.
Foxx herself added: “I understand how hard it was for these victims to come forward and tell their stories. I applaud their courage and have the utmost respect for everyone who came forward”.
“While this may not be the result they were expecting, due to the sentences that Mr Kelly is facing, we do feel that justice has been served”, she went on. “My office will direct our resources to find justice for other victims of sexual abuse who do not have the power of a documentary to bring their abusers to light”.
