CHICAGO — The new lawyer for Chicago-born R&B singer R. Kelly has asked a federal judge to overturn his conviction on racketeering charges in New York, saying prosecutors misused a federal statute meant to go after gang leaders and that Kelly’s ineffective lawyers failed to keep hopelessly biased jurors off the panel.
Kelly, 54, was convicted Sept. 27 in U.S. District Court in Brooklyn on racketeering conspiracy charges alleging he used his music career to further a criminal enterprise.
The jury found him guilty of 12 individual illegal acts, including sex with multiple underage girls as well as a 1994 scheme to bribe an Illinois public aid official to get a phony ID for 15-year-old singer Aaliyah so the two could get married.
He faces 10 years to life in prison when he’s sentenced in May. Kelly is currently being held without bond at a federal detention facility in Brooklyn.
The motions filed late Thursday are unlikely to persuade U.S. District Judge Ann Donnelly to grant a new trial to Kelly, but they telegraph issues sure to be brought up later when the case is appealed to the 2nd Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals.
Prosecutors have until March 10 to file a response.
In one filing, Kelly’s new attorney, Jennifer Bonjean, assailed the government’s use of the racketeering statute to fashion a case against the singer, saying it was classic #MeToo-era overreach and allowed prosecutors to circumvent “pesky” statute of limitation issues arising from decades-old sex abuse allegations.
“Invigorated by an influential social movement determined to punish centuries of male misbehavior through symbolic prosecutions of high-profile men, the government brought a RICO prosecution against (Kelly) that was ‘absurdly remote’ from the drafters’ intent,” Bonjean wrote in the 62-page motion for judgment of acquittal.
Bonjean said prosecutors improperly presented an overabundance of “bad character” testimony from a parade of witnesses that overwhelmed the jury with salacious information about Kelly’s sexual habits but had little or nothing to do with the racketeering charge he was facing.
Among those witnesses, according to Bonjean, was Jane Doe 5, a former girlfriend of Kelly’s who testified at trial that the singer physically, sexually and psychologically abused her over a number of years, including administering beatings for violating his bizarre rules and forcing her to have sex with strangers as punishment.
Bonjean’s motion included pages upon pages of text messages between the girl and her mother that she says showed they conspired to win Kelly’s affection to further Jane Doe 5′s music career. In one exchange, the girl’s mother tells her she should “do something seductive” to mess with Kelly, like blow him little kisses and “wink at him and bite the tip of (your) finger.”
In 2015, after the girl flew to California on Kelly’s invitation to see one of his shows, she texted her mother from her spot near the stage, saying Kelly was “singing this whole show to me.”
“This man in love,” Jane Doe 5 allegedly texted.
According to the filing, her mother replied, “Omg you gonna marry him and have his babies … Lol my son in law gonna be older than me”
The messages, according to Bonjean’s motion, showed that “no rational juror could conclude that (Kelly) enticed, persuaded, induced, or coerced Jane to travel to California,” as the jury in Kelly’s case found.
In a separate filing, Bonjean made a lengthy claim of ineffective assistance of counsel, blasting Kelly’s trial lawyers as serially incompetent and saying they allowed several jurors who’d admitted seeing the 2019 Lifetime docuseries “Surviving R. Kelly,” which portrayed Kelly as a serial predator and included interviews with many of the government’s witnesses.
For example, the motion stated, Kelly’s trial attorneys failed to ask a single question of Juror #3, who admitted on a questionnaire that he’d seen “a documentary about him and his legal troubles” and “heard that he has been sleeping with underage girls.”
While the juror went on to say he could remain impartial, Bonjean said that “defies logic.”
“Anyone who’d seen ‘Surviving R. Kelly’ should’ve been removed for cause,” Bonjean wrote in her motion.
The motion also alleged that Kelly’s lead trial attorney, Nicole Blank Becker, was laboring under a “disabling conflict of interest” since she’d earlier assisted Jane Doe 5, one of the government’s key witnesses.
The Tribune has previously reported on the conflict, which prompted the judge to hold a pretrial hearing to determine whether Becker should be removed from the defense team.
In the end, Donnelly allowed Becker to stay but barred her from participating in the cross-examination of Jane Doe 5. That was a mistake, according to Bonjean.
“Becker formed an attorney-client relationship with Jane that put her at odds with her duty of loyalty to (Kelly),” Bonjean wrote. “The risk of prejudice was made more significant by the fact that Jane was not just any witness, but the government’s star witness. Defendant’s Sixth Amendment guarantee of a conflict-free counsel was denied.”
Becker, who withdrew from Kelly’s case earlier this month along with the other two members of the trial team, could not immediately be reached for comment Friday.
Bonjean, whose legal career began in Chicago, was the driving force behind comedian Bill Cosby’s appeal of his sex crimes conviction in Pennsylvania and wound up winning the actor’s stunning release from prison.
She joined Kelly’s case late last year for purposes of appeal, but has since signed on as his full-time attorney and will defend Kelly against pending sex-abuse allegations in federal court in Chicago, which is currently set for trial in August.
The singer is charged in U.S. District Court in Chicago with running a yearslong scheme to buy back sex tapes he allegedly made with underage girls and to bribe or coerce witnesses in his 2008 child pornography trial in Cook County, which ended in acquittal.
While there are no racketeering allegations in the Chicago indictment, there is a lot of overlap in the evidence supporting the charges.
Other indictments alleging sexual abuse by Kelly brought in Cook County in February 2019 have yet to be scheduled for trial.
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