A former merchandizing agent for R. Kelly testified Tuesday that the singer offered him $1 million to find a VHS tape featuring Kelly. Prosecutors sought persuade jurors that Kelly was desperate to recover the missing recording, knowing it could land him in legal peril if it fell into the hands of law enforcement. Based in part on that recording, which prosecutors say shows the R&B star sexually abusing a 14-year-old girl, Kelly faces charges that include production of child pornography. He is also accused of fixing his 2008 state child pornography trial by threatening witnesses and endeavoring to conceal video evidence
Charles Freeman testified Tuesday that Kelly reached out to him in 2001 to ask him to hunt down the recording. Freeman also explained how he pressured Kelly and his associates for years to pay him the full $1 million after he found and returned the tape, the AP reports. Freeman told jurors he didn’t know the contents of the video until after he retrieved it from a home in Atlanta in 2001 and then slipped it into a VHS player at a friend's home later that day. "I observed Robert Kelly with a young lady having sex," he said. Freeman said he threatened to go public with what he knew and filed lawsuits to squeeze Kelly to pay.
He said each threat and lawsuit typically led to Kelly associates throwing more money at him, sometimes literally. When a prosecutor asked Freeman, who testified Tuesday under an immunity agreement, why it took him nearly two decades to turn the recording over to police, along with other recordings of child pornography tied to Kelly, Freeman responded: "Because the police wasn’t going to pay me a million dollars." Kelly, 55, is already serving a 30-year prison sentence imposed by a federal judge in New York in June for his 2021 convictions on racketeering and sex trafficking charges. If convicted in Chicago, he could see years added to that sentence.
story continues below
At his 2008 trial, at which Kelly was ultimately acquitted, state prosecutors described Kelly lugging a duffel bag full of his homemade child pornography tapes everywhere he went. Despite Kelly’s efforts in the 1990s to keep them close, some leaked out or were stolen by disgruntled workers or friends, prosecutors said. After acquitting Kelly in 2008, some jurors told reporters they had no choice but to find Kelly not guilty because the girl—who then was in her 20s—did not take the witness stand to confirm it was her in the video. Last week, she did testify at the federal trail in Chicago, saying she was the minor in the video and Kelly was the adult man.
(More
R. Kelly stories.)
,
uBlock 
,
and
Ghostery 
)
