The disgraced singer R. Kelly must serve an additional year in jail on top of his current 30-year term.
After a New York trial, Kelly was sentenced to 30 years in prison for racketeering and trafficking in women in June 2022.
A few months later, he was found guilty of soliciting minors for sex and creating child sexual imagery in a second federal trial in Chicago.
He now faces a 20-year prison sentence for those offenses, but 19 of those years will be served concurrently with the earlier sentence.
If fully served, he would not be released from prison until he was in his mid-80s.
In the second case, federal prosecutors were requesting a longer sentence than what was required by federal sentencing guidelines—a 25-year sentence. They claimed that the fact that Kelly recorded his crimes and later posted some of the footage online made them worse.
In a memo, they claimed that more people had watched child pornography because Kelly is Kelly. "The consequences of Kelly's behavior are extensive, unquantifiable, and irreversible. ".
A lengthy sentence was necessary to "protect the community" from further harm, according to the memo, which claimed Kelly has an "insatiable" desire to harm children.
Kelly's defense lawyer, Jennifer Bonjean, had requested that the judge permit Kelly to serve his most recent sentence concurrently with his prior sentence, which would have meant that he would have completed both at the same time. She claimed that a series of sentences would be equivalent to a "second life sentence.".
She further asserted that the prosecution had fabricated a story to "inflame" opinions of the former R&B star.
The Chicago trial heard testimony from the victim, who went by the alias "Jane," who claimed that Kelly had violated her sexually hundreds of times before she turned 18.
During the trial, the jury members watched three videos of the abuse. Kelly was accused of abusing four additional women when they were young.
Kelly was accused of trafficking women for sexual abuse across the US in his previous trial in New York, with the assistance of his managers and other members of his entourage.
The Grammy-winning singer, best known for songs like Ignition (Remix) and the immensely popular 1996 anthem I Believe I Can Fly, is one of the most prominent artists to be accused of abuse in the wake of the MeToo movement.
