CHICAGO — Jurors in R. Kelly’s federal child pornography trial on Tuesday heard a tale seemingly ripped from a B-movie script: Clandestine hotel meetings. Sex tapes. Bags filled with cash. Tough guys with guns.
But this was no movie, according to Charles Freeman, a key prosecution witness who was at the center of it all.
Instead, Freeman said, it was a real-life cloak-and-dagger scheme orchestrated by Kelly and his associates to recover video footage of the R&B superstar allegedly sexually assaulting a 14-year-old girl. Freeman was paid hundreds of thousands of dollars over the years in exchange for getting at least one of the tapes back, he said.
