New claims surfaced Friday about the former lead prosecutor in R&B superstar R. Kelly’s federal case in Chicago, with lawyers for one of his former employees alleging the prosecutor may have developed an inappropriate personal relationship with an alleged victim.
A little more than a week before Kelly is set to go to trial, lawyers for co-defendant Derrel McDavid said that Assistant U.S. Attorney Angel Krull identified the alleged victim in her phone contact list as “Boss Baby.” They also said they’ve discovered calls and an in-person meeting between the prosecutor and the alleged victim that were not documented.
The lawyers, Beau Brindley and Vadim Glozman, made their claims in a new 10-page motion filed early Friday morning. Kelly and McDavid are set to go to trial along with another former Kelly worker, Milton “June” Brown, on Aug. 15.
Kelly, who is already serving a 30-year federal prison sentence for his conviction last year in New York, faces serious child pornography and obstruction of justice charges in Chicago. Krull is no longer assigned to the U.S. attorney’s office here.
McDavid’s lawyers alleged earlier this week that Krull used a private email account and a fake name, “Demetrius Slovenski,” to engage in “surreptitious” communications with Jim DeRogatis, a former Chicago Sun-Times journalist who first helped report on sexual abuse allegations against Kelly.
Federal prosecutors are expected to respond to those allegations in writing later Friday. Krull did not immediately respond to a message from the Sun-Times about the new claims, and a spokesman for the U.S. attorney’s office in Chicago declined to comment.
McDavid’s lawyers say prosecutors handed over the correspondence between Krull and DeRogatis on Monday, and it shed new light on other evidence in the case. They now say screenshots of text messages between Krull and the alleged victim reference meetings and calls that do not correspond to previously disclosed reports, as well as the need for Krull to contact the alleged victim outside of work hours.
In one text message, Krull refers to the alleged victim as “BB,” an apparent reference to the “Boss Baby” moniker, the lawyers wrote.
The alleged victim at issue was also central to Kelly’s 2008 child pornography trial in Cook County. Her refusal to testify in that case was blamed for Kelly’s acquittal then.
McDavid’s lawyers wrote that a Homeland Security Investigations agent, Amalia Molina, apparently participated in several unreported meetings and phone calls. They wrote that Molina forwarded a pregnancy selfie of the alleged victim to Krull. The prosecutor told the alleged victim that she was “beautiful” and “glowing” and that Krull was “very happy and excited,” according to the motion.
“This kind of blatant pandering with a material witness in the case is not only inexplicable and unorthodox, but it creates the plain appearance of impropriety,” Brindley and Glozman wrote.
The lawyers alleged that Krull and Molina may have fostered an inappropriate personal relationship with “indisputably one of the central witnesses in this case.”
“I have tried federal cases in district courts all across this country,” Brindley told the Sun-Times in a text message. “And I have never seen any U.S. attorney engage in such inappropriately personal dialogue with a material witness. Secret, undocumented conversations with a critical witness will not be ignored. The government needs to answer for this impropriety.”
