NEW YORK — After allegedly locking up victims ordered to call him “Daddy,” R. Kelly was ordered held without bail during his first appearance in Brooklyn federal court Friday.
Looking tired and puffy in his blue-and-orange jail uniform, Kelly said little during the short hearing and pleaded not guilty to his five-count sex trafficking indictment through his lawyer.
The Grammy winner turned two times to scan the courtroom and smile at co-girlfriends Jocelyn Savage and Azriel Clary, who traveled to New York from Chicago in a show of support.
In the superseding indictment filed July 10, a Brooklyn grand jury indicted Kelly, 52, on charges he ran a racketeering enterprise for two decades that sexually exploited underage girls and young women and engaged in coercion, kidnapping and forced labor.
Prosecutors claim the raunchy R&B singer, who’s been dogged by allegations of sexual misconduct for years but was acquitted in 2008 on child porn charges in Chicago, has been a serial sex predator since at least 1999.
The indictment involves five Jane Doe victims — three of them minors at the time of their alleged abuse.
Prosecutors claim Kelly — whose real name is Robert Kelly — locked some of the alleged victims in rooms with no access to food or water, used them to create child pornography, forced them to wear baggy clothing in public, hid the fact he had a sexually transmitted disease and told them to call him “Daddy.”
If convicted on all counts, Kelly faces the possibility of decades in prison.
“They’re not minor charges,” U.S. Magistrate Judge Steven L. Tiscione said Friday. “He has significant incentive to flee given the long prison term.”
The judge also acknowledged a different federal judge in Chicago previously ruled Kelly should remain locked up ahead of trial on a separate indictment filed in the Windy City earlier this month.
“Even if I released him on bail in this case, he’s not going anywhere,” Tiscione said.
Send questions/comments to the editors.
