R Kelly, the already convicted musician, must serve one additional year in prison on top of his current 30-year term.
During a New York conviction for sex trafficking and racketeering, Kelly was sentenced to thirty years in prison in June 2022.
He was found guilty of soliciting minors for sex and creating child sexual imagery in a second federal trial in Chicago a few months later.
He is currently serving a 20-year sentence for the offences, however 19 of those years will be served concurrently with the prior one.
He would spend his entire sentence in prison, which would take him until his mid-80s.
In the second case, federal prosecutors were asking for a term of 25 years, which was longer than what was called for by federal sentencing guidelines.
They said that the fact that Kelly recorded his actions and that some of the video was later made public online made them worse.
They said in a memo that “Kelly is Kelly, more individuals have watched child pornography.” “Kelly’s behavior has wide-ranging, unfathomable, and irrevocable effects.”
According to the report, Kelly has a “insatiable” urge to damage kids, therefore a hefty term is necessary to “guard the community” from additional harm.
Kelly’s defense lawyer, Jennifer Bonjean, had requested the judge to let him serve both sentences concurrently, which would have meant that he would have completed both at once. A further sentence, according to her, would be equivalent to a “second life sentence.”
She further asserted that the prosecution had “embellished” the story in order to “inflame” opinions of the former R&B singer.
The victim, who went by the alias “Jane,” claimed in the Chicago trial that Kelly had violated her sexually hundreds of times before she turned 18.
Throughout the trial, jurors were shown three videos of the abuse. Kelly was also accused of assaulting four other women when they were kids.
Jurors in Kelly’s previous trial in New York were told that he helped his managers and other members of his entourage transit women around the Country for sex abuse.
The Grammy-winning singer, who is best known for songs like Ignition (Remix) and the immensely popular anthem I Believe I Can Fly from 1996, is one of the most well-known artists to have been accused of abuse in the aftermath of the #MeToo movement.
