R. Kelly Charged With Sexual Abuse in Chicago

Kelly, who has been trailed by accusations of sexual misconduct for two decades, has been under renewed scrutiny since the documentary “Surviving R. Kelly” was broadcast on Lifetime in January.

Celebrity lawyer Michael Avenatti said last week that he had obtained a video showing Kelly having sex with a 14-year-old girl, and given it to the Cook County state’s attorney’s office in Chicago. He has said that Kelly and the girl refer to her age multiple times in the video, which is more than 40 minutes long.

On Thursday, two additional women came forward at a news conference in New York organized by their lawyer, Gloria Allred, to accuse Kelly of sexual abuse and misconduct when they were minors. The women, Latresa Scaff, 40, and Rochelle Washington, 39, said they met the singer after a concert in the mid-1990s when they were 16 and 15; they said he asked for a threesome and had sex with Scaff.

Steven Greenberg, Kelly’s lawyer, did not immediately respond to a request for comment, but he has said that Kelly “denies that he has engaged in any illegal conduct, of any kind whatsoever.” Aggravated criminal sexual abuse can carry a sentence of three to seven years in prison.

Kelly, 52, has never been convicted of a crime, but he has faced accusations of sexual misconduct and abuse for years. More than 20 years ago, Vibe magazine questioned a marriage certificate that said singer Aaliyah was 18 when she and Kelly were wed. She was, in fact, 15 at the time, and the marriage was annulled. Greenberg has said Kelly did not know she was underage at the time. Aaliyah died in a plane crash in 2001.

The following year, Kelly was arrested on child pornography charges, over a tape prosecutors said showed him having sex with and urinating on an underage girl. After six years of delays, Kelly was acquitted in 2008 on all 14 charges against him. The girl from the video never testified, and Kelly’s lawyers argued that her identity could not be proven.

In 2017, music journalist Jim DeRogatis wrote articles for BuzzFeed that described Kelly keeping women in a “cult,” in which he separated them from their families and exerted tremendous control over their lives.

After so many years in which Kelly seemed impervious to the accusations against him, things seemed to take a turn in January, after “Surviving R. Kelly” caused a stir. Law enforcement authorities in Illinois and Georgia, where he has lived, began looking into his conduct. And after tremendous public pressure from activists, Kelly was dropped by his label, RCA, just two weeks after the program aired.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.