After decades of sexual misconduct allegations, a public trial and private settlements, Kelly, 52, was charged with 10 counts of aggravated criminal sexual abuse in connection with four victims, three of whom were underage, according to the Cook County state’s attorney, Kim Foxx.
Judge John Fitzgerald Lyke Jr. of the Circuit Court of Cook County said at Kelly’s bail hearing Saturday that the singer was prohibited from having contact with any of the victims or anyone under the age of 18. He was instructed to surrender his passport. Bond was set at $250,000 for each of the four cases against him. As of early Saturday afternoon, Kelly had not posted bond.
If he is convicted, Kelly could face a prison term of three to seven years for each count of aggravated criminal sexual abuse.
Kelly, whose real name is Robert Kelly, was accused of attempted criminal sexual assault with a fourth victim. Court documents said that she reported the episode to law enforcement authorities within two years.
Kelly’s lawyer, Steven Greenberg, denied any wrongdoing by his client. After Kelly surrendered to police, Greenberg insisted that the women were lying.
“He’s going to be vindicated on all of these charges,” Greenberg said. “One by one, if it has to be.”
Kelly has been indicted before. He was arrested in 2002 on child pornography charges stemming from a video that prosecutors said showed him having sex with and urinating on an underage girl. After six years, he was acquitted of all counts against him.
Jurors in that case said that a significant problem for the prosecution was that the girl in the video did not testify. More than a dozen witnesses identified her, but Kelly’s lawyers successfully argued that her identity could not be known for certain.
Allegations against Kelly stretch back decades, but the accusations received renewed attention after the six-part documentary “Surviving R. Kelly” aired on Lifetime in January.
The program cataloged allegations of abuse going back to the 1990s, and accused Kelly of holding women in cultlike conditions, keeping them from their families and exerting enormous control over their lives, demanding they ask permission to bathe, eat or go to the bathroom.
The allegations in the documentary had been made before, but the culture around sexual misconduct had changed tremendously since Kelly’s last trial, in the wake of the #MeToo movement and the continued fallout from abuse by Catholic priests.
In the midst of a ferocious outcry, his record label, RCA, a division of Sony Music Entertainment, dropped him two weeks after the documentary aired. Investigators in Illinois, Georgia and New York began looking into his conduct.
“I am cautiously optimistic,” said Kenyette Tisha Barnes, co-founder of the #MuteRKelly social media campaign. “The difference between this indictment and the last indictment is that you didn’t have the degree of public pressure to get him convicted in 2008. It was actually the opposite — more people wanted him acquitted.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.