Musician R. Kelly was just sentenced to an additional 20 years in prison Thursday after being convicted in a Chicago federal court last year on charges of child pornography and enticement of a minor.
The R&B singer, whose full name is Robert Sylvester Kelly, is already serving 30 years for a 2021 conviction of racketeering and sex trafficking in a New York federal court, per CNN.
U.S. District Judge Harry D. Leinenweber said in court Thursday that 19 years of the 20-year prison sentence would be served at the same time as his current sentence while one year will need to be served after this sentence is completed.
Kelly was found guilty of three counts of production of child pornography and three counts of enticement of a minor to engage in criminal sexual activity. The musician’s attorneys requested a new trial but that motion was denied this week.
Prosecutors had asked for Kelly to receive a 25-year sentence to be served at the completion of his 30 year sentence.
“Robert Kelly is a serial sexual predator who, over the course of many years, specifically targeted young girls and went to great lengths to conceal his abuse of Jane and other minor victims,” prosecutors wrote in the filing. “To this day, and even following the jury verdict against him, Kelly refuses to accept responsibility for his crimes.”
Kelly’s attorneys argued that the singer was already serving a “de facto life sentence” and asked for this new sentence to be served concurrently.
“In the unlikely event that Kelly was to survive his 30-year sentence, there is no reason to believe he would reoffend as a geriatric in his mid-80s,” his attorneys wrote. “The overwhelming majority of Kelly’s criminal conduct was committed a quarter century ago.”
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Some of Kelly’s victims spoke at his previous sentencing, as The Daily Wire previously reported.
“You made me do things that broke my spirit. I literally wished I would die because of how low you made me feel,” one woman said while addressing the singer. “Do you remember that?”
Kelly was found guilty in September 2021 after a month-long trial that included no fewer than 50 separate witness testimonies. Prosecutors detailed the singer’s “decades of crime” and “callous disregard for the very real effects that his crimes had on his victims.”
“The defendant’s decades of crime appear to have been fueled by narcissism and a belief that his musical talent absolved him of any need to conform his conduct — no matter how predatory, harmful, humiliating or abusive to others — to the strictures of the law,” prosecutors wrote in the filing.
They also called Kelly’s actions “brazen, manipulative, controlling and coercive.”
“He has shown no remorse or respect for the law,” the filing stated. “Put simply, [Kelly’s] crimes were calculated, methodical, and part [of] a long-standing pattern of using his platform as a larger-than-life musical persona and his deep network to gain access to teenagers, many of whom were particularly vulnerable, and then to exploit them for his personal gain and sexual gratification.”