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Following R. Kelly’s arrest on federal charges of sex trafficking comes word that he paid thousands of dollars to recover videotapes of himself having sex with teenage girls.
Kelly was arrested in Chicago Thursday night and is expected to remain in custody until Tuesday.
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As previously reported by TheGrio, the embattled singer is facing two separate federal grand jury indictments in Illinois and New York. The U.S. attorney spokesman Joseph Fitzpatrick has told the Associated Press that the 13-count indictment includes charges of child pornography, enticement of a minor and obstruction of justice.
Kelly is accused of recruiting young women for sex and allegedly convinced folks on his team to conceal his sexual encounters with teens. He reportedly spent hundreds of thousands of dollars buying back several missing explicit videotapes of his alleged victims.
Prosecutors say Kelly videotaped himself having sex with at least four girls under the age of 18 beginning in 1998. Years later, when the R&B hitmaker discovered some of the tapes were missing from his “collection,” he began paying “hundreds of thousands of dollars” to several people to recover them, the indictment says.
Kelly then directed those same people to take polygraph tests to confirm that they had returned all copies of the tapes.
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The Illinois indictment has charged Kelly with “one count of conspiracy to receive child pornography, two counts of receiving child pornography, four counts of producing child pornography, five counts of enticement of a minor to engage in criminal sexual activity, and one count of conspiracy to obstruct justice,” reports CNN.
The New York indictment accuses him of sexual exploitation of a child, kidnapping, forced labor and trafficking women and girls from 1999 to the present.
NBC4 New York reported that R. Kelly was picked up by Homeland Security NYPD Investigation agents and NYPD Public Safety Task Force, and is expected to be taken to New York. However, during his brief appearance in a Chicago federal court on Friday, the judge delayed a decision on whether Kelly should be taken to New York to face charges until he is arraigned in Chicago, according to the CNN report.
“R. Kelly’s Enterprise was not only engaged in music; as alleged, for two decades the enterprise at the direction of R. Kelly preyed upon young women and teenagers whose dreams of meeting a superstar, soon turned into a nightmare of rape, child pornography, and forced labor. The musician turned predator allegedly used his stardom to coax some victims into nefarious sex acts while certain members of his enterprise calculatingly facilitated the aberrant conduct,” Homeland Security Special Agent-in-Charge Angel Melendez said in a statement.
R. Kelly has been accused of multiple crimes against women over the past 20 years. He has vehemently denied all present and past allegations of sexual misconduct which has been leveled against him.
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