The Pied Piper is back in the slammer and this time the charges could place him behind bars for good. Following his arrest, reports have surfaced that R. Kelly shelled out thousands of dollars to try and get back his missing sex tapes with underage girls.
The disgraced Grammy award-winning singer was arrested in Chicago on Thursday on federal charges of sex trafficking and is expected to remain in custody until Tuesday. Kelly is facing two separate federal grand jury indictments in Illinois and New York including charges of child pornography, enticement of a minor and obstruction of justice, U.S. attorney spokesman Joseph Fitzpatrick told the Associated Press.
The “Ignition” singer is accused of recruiting young women and teen girls for sex and allegedly forcing members of his team to conceal the sexual encounters that he often recorded. According to reports, Kelly spent hundreds of thousands of dollars trying to bu back several missing copies of videotapes containing explicit footage of his sexual encounters with his alleged victims. He’s also accused of forcing polygraph tests on those he paid off.
According to the indictment, Kelly recorded himself having sex with at least four girls under the age of 18 beginning in 1998.
After the “Happy People” realized some of the tapes were missing from his “collection,” years later, he shelled out “hundreds of thousands of dollars” to several people to recover them.
Those he paid off, he forced them to take polygraph tests to confirm that they had returned all copies of the tapes, the indictment says. The singer is facing some serious federal charges in both Illinois and New York.
The Illinois indictment 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,” CNN reports.
Meanwhile, 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.
Kelly was arrested by Homeland Security NYPD Investigation agents and NYPD Public Safety Task Force and is expected to be taken to New York to face federal charges, NBC4 reports.
“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.
Despite the shocking details revealed in the “Surviving R. Kelly” documentary, R. Kelly continues to deny sexual assault and misconduct allegations that has plagued him for the past 20 years.
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