CHICAGO — The video of R. Kelly sexually abusing his teenage goddaughter, “Jane,” has haunted her for more than two decades, robbing her of her childhood, of her dreams of being a musician, of any chance she ever had at normalcy.
“Every time I walk into a room, it feels like the child pornography tapes arrive a couple minutes before I do. I am rarely seen,” Jane wrote in a statement that was read aloud in a hushed federal courtroom on Thursday. “My teenage years and adulthood have been built through the lens of a pedophile.”
The statement, along with ones read by two other women who were victimized by Kelly as teens, punctuated a dramatic sentencing hearing that was essentially 21 years in the making, beginning when Kelly was charged with child pornography in Cook County in 2002, only to later be acquitted.
