Chicago - Jailed R&B star R. Kelly pleaded not guilty in a
Chicago federal courtroom Wednesday to a new indictment brought in
New York alleging he bribed an Illinois official to get a fake ID for
15-year-old singer Aaliyah a day before he married her in 1994.
Dressed in an orange jail jumpsuit, Kelly, 52, kept his hands clasped
behind his back as he appeared for his arraignment before U.S. Judge
Ann M. Donnelly in Brooklyn via a live television feed from a largely
empty 17th-floor courtroom at the Dirksen U.S. Courthouse.
The superseding indictment filed in federal court in Brooklyn last
week alleged that Kelly directed someone in August 1994 to bribe the
public official into making a false "identification document" for the
female.
The Chicago Tribune has obtained records showing that the female,
identified in the charges only as "Jane Doe #1," was Aaliyah.
The next day, Kelly, then 27, married Aaliyah Haughton in a secret
ceremony with falsified paperwork that gave her age as 18. The
marriage was later annulled by a Michigan judge at the insistence of
Aaliyah's family.
In Illinois, someone must be a minimum of 18 to marry without
parental consent.
The new allegation was added to the sweeping racketeering conspiracy
indictment that New York prosecutors brought over the summer,
accusing the singer of identifying underage girls attending his
concerts and grooming them for later sexual abuse.
Kelly's attorney, Steven Greenberg, has previously said the new
indictment "does not appear to materially alter the landscape."
"We continue to look forward to the day he is free," he told the
Tribune by text last week.
Kelly is in federal custody awaiting trial on the New York charges as
well as a separate indictment brought by federal prosecutors in
Chicago alleging the singer conspired with two former employees to
rig his 2008 child pornography trial in Cook County by paying off
witnesses and victims to change their stories.
In addition, Kelly was charged in Cook County criminal court in
February with four separate indictments accusing him of sexual
misconduct over more than a decade. Three of those alleged victims
were underage at the time.
If convicted in all jurisdictions, the embattled singer, whose full
name is Robert Sylvester Kelly, could potentially face the rest of
his life in prison.
Aaliyah met Kelly when she was just 12; as his protege, she went on
to become a teenage R&B star. Her smash-hit May 1994 debut album,
"Age Ain't Nothing But a Number," was produced and written by Kelly.
The nature of their relationship and Aaliyah's real age were the
subject of much public speculation at the time. Their secret marriage
collapsed after Aaliyah's parents found out and insisted on an
annulment, according to news accounts.
Aaliyah left Kelly's record label later that year. She died in a
plane crash in 2001.
In the recent documentary "Surviving R. Kelly," Kelly's former tour
manager, Demetrius Smith, said he arranged the forged Aaliyah
marriage documents for Kelly and was one of a handful of people
present at the small ceremony in Rosemont.
"It was just a quick little ceremony. She didn't have on a white
dress. He didn't have on a tux," Smith said in the documentary. "Just
everyday wear. She looked worried and scared."
Smith, who has not been charged with any wrongdoing, told TMZ in an
interview last week that he'd been subpoenaed to testify by federal
investigators.
Documents obtained by the Tribune through an open records request
show that federal prosecutors in New York subpoenaed the Cook County
clerk's office in July for Kelly's marriage records to Aaliyah and
later to Andrea Danyell Kelly, which ended in divorce in 2009.
Federal prosecutors in Chicago, meanwhile, also asked for records
pertaining to the Aaliyah marriage, the records show.
In March, Assistant U.S. Attorney Angel Krull, the lead prosecutor on
the Chicago case, sent an email to a clerk's office employee asking
for the records "pursuant to an open law enforcement investigation,"
according to the documents obtained by the Tribune.
"Given the high-profile nature of the request, we ask that, to the
extent possible, you keep the fact of this request limited to as few
people as possible within your agency," Krull wrote.