R. Kelly has been convicted of child pornography charges after a guilty verdict delivered on Wednesday by a federal jury in Chicago.
Following 11 hours of deliberation, the jury found Kelly guilty on three out of the four counts of child pornography and three out of five counts of enticement of a minor. The singer was acquitted on seven other charges, including obstruction of justice and conspiracy to receive child pornography in relation to his 2002 Cook County case. According to a report from the Chicago Tribune, U.S. Attorney John Lausch said that Kelly could face anywhere from 10 to 90 years in prison as a result of the convictions.
The charges stem from Kelly's 2008 child pornography trial, which the disgraced singer was eventually acquitted of after the 14-year-old victim refused to testify. The now 37-year-old woman alleged that she was coached by Kelly on what to say before the grand jury and flown, with her family, out of the country in order to keep them away from investigators and the media. After more than a decade, the victim decided to break her silence and testify in August saying that she had become "exhausted with living with [Kelly’s] lies.”
“Robert Kelly abused many girls over many years,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Elizabeth Pozolo told the courts. “He committed horrible crimes against children. All these years later, the hidden side of Robert Kelly has come out. That child, who had no prior sexual experiences in her life, was forced to lay on that floor while that man sitting right over there urinated on her. That degrading act is forever captured on that video. That abuse is forever memorialized.”
This verdict comes just months after another federal court sentenced Kelly to 30 years in prison for sex trafficking and racketeering in New York. It's unclear whether or not Kelly will serve both the sex trafficking and racketeering sentence with the yet-to-be-determined sentence for child pornography concurrently but the singer still faces state level charges in both Illinois and Minnesota regardless.
Photo via Getty/Jose M. Osorio/Chicago Tribune/Tribune News Service