Disgraced singer R. Kelly is pointing the finger at his former attorneys.
According to theNew York Daily News, the convicted predator recently filed an affidavit in which he criticized his ex-legal team for their actions, or lack thereof, during the jury selection process in his sex crimes case. Kelly said there were multiple jurors who “may” have watched Surviving R. Kelly, dream hampton’s 2019 docuseries on Lifetime that explored long-standing abuse allegations against him. It went on to win a Peabody Award.
“At certain points during jury selection, I did hear that some jurors may have seen the Surviving R. Kelly docuseries and that concerned me greatly,” Kelly wrote. “I raised my concerns with my attorneys but they shooed me off. I was nothing more than a bystander in the process. ... There was no strategy involved in choosing the jurors that sat on my jury as far as I could tell. At least there was no trial strategy that involved my input.”
The affidavit was filed more than six months after Kelly was convicted of all counts in his federal racketeering and sex trafficking case. Prosecutors alleged the 55-year-old singer had a decades-long history of grooming and sexually abusing underage individuals. He is scheduled to be sentenced on May 4, and faces a maximum sentence of life in prison.
Kelly, who has vehemently denied the abuse allegations, has since hired a new attorney and continues to seek a retrial. His current lawyer Jennifer Bonjean described Surviving R. Kelly as a “one-sided” series that “several of the jurors had viewed” prior to the case. Because of this, Bonjean argues her client was never given a fair trial.
“Because defendant was forced to defend against dozens of uncharged claims of abusive and sexual misbehavior—much of it lawful albeit unpalatable for some—defendant was stripped of the presumption of innocence and denied a fair trial,” Bonjean wrote in a court memo last month. “But that is not all, Defendant was denied effective assistance of counsel when his attorneys failed to file adequate pre-trial objections to the introduction of the mass of overly prejudicial propensity evidence and routinely failed to lodge timely objections to some (although not all) of the damning bad-act evidence.”
