Following roughly a year of delays, lawyers for R&B singer R. Kelly told a judge Thursday they expect their client will stand trial in federal court in Brooklyn later this year.
Defense attorney Steve Greenberg made the comment during a status hearing in Kelly’s federal case in Chicago.
“I am certain it’s going to go ahead,” Greenberg said of the Brooklyn trial, which is set for early August.
Greenberg said the trial will likely last six weeks, meaning it would overlap with Kelly’s tentative trial date in federal court in Chicago, set for September. Greenberg told U.S. District Judge Harry Leinenweber that rescheduling the Chicago trial for October or November is also unrealistic.
“It is an entirely different set of discovery,” Greenberg said. “It is immense. And I just don’t see how we could do it. Right now we’re having a hard enough time getting ready for the New York trial.”
Leinenweber told lawyers in the Chicago case to discuss a new trial date, and he set another status hearing for July 15.
The coronavirus pandemic repeatedly thwarted attempts to put Kelly, 54, on trial in 2020. Instead, he’s been held in federal custody in Chicago’s downtown Metropolitan Correctional Center despite multiple requests for bail. He has been held there since his arrest in July 2019, when prosecutors in Brooklyn and Chicago hit him with indictments in each district.
Leinenweber remarked during the status hearing, held by telephone, that Kelly’s Chicago trial needs to go ahead at some point. The judge said Kelly is in the MCC “and he’s presumably not happy there.”
That prompted laughter on the call.
“I think that’s a fair comment,” Greenberg said.
The Brooklyn indictment charges Kelly with racketeering and alleges Kelly led an “enterprise” made up of his managers, bodyguards, drivers and other employees who helped him recruit women and girls for sex. The judge there has agreed to keep jurors in the case anonymous and “partially sequestered.”
The Chicago indictment charges Kelly with child pornography and obstruction of justice. It alleges he thwarted his earlier 2008 prosecution in Cook County with threats, gifts and six-figure payoffs.
