R Kelly will serve an extra year in prison on charges relating to possessing child pornography and child enticement.
The disgraced singer was found guilty of six of 13 counts of owning and producing child pornography and enticing a minor back in September. On Thursday (February 23), he was sentenced to 20 years in prison but he will serve almost all of his sentence simultaneously alongside the jail term he received last year for racketeering and trafficking.
The additional sentence means that in total, Kelly will now serve 31 years in prison and he will not be eligible for release until he is 80 years old.
The central question relating to the sentencing in Kelly’s hometown of Chicago was whether Kelly would be ordered to serve the additional sentence simultaneously alongside or after the completion of his previous 30-year sentence. If the judge had decided upon the latter option, this would have been equivalent to a life sentence.
Prosecutors had acknowledged that lengthening his sentence would almost guarantee Kelly would spend the rest of his life behind bars but argued that his crimes against children and lack of contrition justified it.
R Kelly appealed to have a Chicago court overturn its guilty verdict on the trial, but lost his plea, with judge Henry D. Leinenweber ruling that federal prosecutors offered “enough evidence to sustain a guilty verdict on all six counts Kelly was convicted of”.
However, last month, the state of Illinois dropped its local charges in Cook County against R. Kelly, due to “extensive sentences” he’s already serving at a federal level in the state of New York.
At the beginning of the year, a final instalment of the Surviving R. Kelly docuseries aired on Lifetime, covering Kelly’s 2022 federal trial. The docuseries also examined the role played by those around Kelly who enabled him, either by turning a blind eye to his abuse over three decades or helping him see his victims, such as by booking flights for underage girls to travel across state lines.
It also examined Kelly’s marriage with the late singer Aaliyah, revealing that he silenced her and her family with a non-disclosure agreement after the annulment of their marriage, which took place when Aaliyah was 15 with her age falsified as 18 on the marriage certificate.