R. Kelly posts bail after pleading not guilty to sex abuse charges
R. Kelly has pleaded not guilty to all charges of criminal sexual abuse.
The R&B singer’s attorney entered the plea in a Chicago courtroom Monday also telling the judge his client surrendered his passport, per CNN. Kelly was also in court wearing an orange jumpsuit, his second appearance in two days. Kelly was finally able to post bond later Monday evening, which was set at $1 million Friday.
Last week, the 52-year-old was charged with 10 counts of aggravated criminal sexual assault involving four victims. Prosecutors say the incidents occurred from 1998 to 2010 with three of the alleged victims being minors. In Illinois, aggravated criminal sexual abuse is a Class 2 felony. If convicted, Kelly faces a maximum of three to seven years in prison on each charge, Cook’s County State’s Attorney Kimberly Foxx said at a news conference last week.
Kelly’s lawyer, Steve Greenberg, has maintained his client’s innocence. “I think all the women are lying, yes. This has become, ‘Hey I can say R. Kelly did something, boom,'” Greenberg told reporters last week. He also argued Foxx indicted Kelly because she was “succumbing to public pressure.”
On Saturday, a judge set Kelly’s bond at $1 million, meaning the singer would need to pay $100,000 to be released. He was unable to come up with the money for two days. Greenberg said the “Ignition” crooner’s finances were a mess.
“This is someone who should be wealthy at this stage of his career,” he declared last week. According to CNN, Greenberg cited “mismanagement,” “hangers-on” and “bad deals” as some of the reasons Kelly “really doesn’t have any money at this point.”
Kelly has been accused of pedophilia and sexual abuse stemming over two decades — accusations he has denied — but a spotlight was put back on the singer after Lifetime’s Surviving R. Kelly docuseries premiered earlier this year. The show’s executive producer, Dream Hampton, told CBS This Morning Monday she did not expect the singer to face charges.
“I remember when I first talked to the other producers about what an ideal outcome would be, and I was thinking about Blackfish, that film that made people turn away from [Sea World]. And I thought that people kind of having all of the facts laid out would mean that they wouldn’t be able to so vociferously kind of support him and talk about his innocence and/or have their heads in the sand about who he was,” she explained. “But no, I quite honestly didn’t think we’d be here.”
[Editor’s note: This post was originally published Feb. 25, 2019 at 12:55 p.m. ET. and was updated to include that R. Kelly posted bond.]
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