By Blessing Udeobasi
Several months after being convicted on nine counts of a s3x trafficking case, American R&B star, Robert Kelly aka R. Kelly has been sentenced to 30years in federal prison.
The 55-year-old singer who was convicted on s3x trafficking and racketeering charges last September following a six-week trial was on Wednesday sentenced by Judge Ann M. Donnelly.
Although the defense lawyers requested a sentence of 10 years or less, Prosecutors had asked for at least 25 years.
While giving a verdict, Judge Donnelly told Kelly he created a trail of broken lives, adding that the most seasoned investigators will not forget the horrors his victims endured.
“These crimes were calculated and carefully planned and regularly executed for almost 25 years, You taught them that love is enslavement and violence.”
Kelly, who declined to speak on Wednesday, learned his fate after his accusers told the court, through tears and anger, that he had preyed on them and misled his fans. He was also ordered to pay a $100,000 fine.
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Kelly has been detained at Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn since his trial. It has not been revealed where Kelly would spend his sentence.
His lawyers had argued he should get no more than 10 years in prison because he had a traumatic childhood “involving severe, prolonged childhood sexual abuse, poverty, and violence.”
As an adult with ‘literacy deficiencies,’ the star was ‘repeatedly defrauded and financially abused, often by the people he paid to protect him,’ his lawyers said.
Allegations that Kelly abused young girls began circulating publicly in the 1990s. He was sued in 1997 by a woman who alleged sexual battery and sexual harassment while she was a minor, and he later faced criminal child pornography charges related to a different girl in Chicago. A jury there acquitted him in 2008, and he settled the lawsuit.
