The long wait is over. Whether justice has been served or denied depends on whose side of the fence you belong. Whether R. Kelly was the man in the sex tape at the center of his child pornography trial, or not did no longer matter. Because the jury wasn't convinced that the female in the graphic video was the 13-year-old girl who prosecutors said she was.
“You want to be 100 percent sure it's Kelly and (the alleged victim),” one juror said. “What we had wasn't enough.”
On friday morning, just a few hours before the verdict, the panelists remained split: seven for acquittal and five for conviction during an early vote. Not one of the five jurors who spoke after the verdict wanted to be identified.
It was a six-year pre-trial delay that came down to an agonizing 10 minutes for R. Kelly, who clutched the hands of the lawyers flanking him while a court official slowly read the verdict for each of the 14 counts. Kelly kept his head down and eyes shut tight, barely moving, until tears began streaming down his face even before the official got to the end of the verdict. Kelly kept whispering, “Thank you, Jesus. Thank you, Jesus. Thank you, Jesus.” Had he been convicted, Kelly would have to face up to 15 years in prison.
For those who are not in know, R.Kelly won the Grammy Award in 1997 for the song “I Believe I Can Fly” and his biggest hits are raunchy ballads like “Ignition.” According to Kelly's publicist, Allan Mayer, Kelly always knew that “when all the facts came out in court, he would be cleared of these terrible charges. ... all he wants to do is move forward and put it behind him.”
The evidence labeled as “People's Exhibit No. 1” on the first day of testimony was the video of a man having sex with a young female, who is naked for most of the recording. While she is often blank-faced, the man speaks to her in a hushed voice, and she calls him “Daddy.” In one scene, the man urinates on her.
Both Kelly and the now 23-year-old alleged victim had denied they were on the videotape. She never testified, nor did her parents, which several jurors cited as a weakness in the prosecution's case.
One of the jurors said he thought the woman's body appeared too developed for 13. Another one said that the prosecutors left too many questions unanswered.
Due to the lack or absence of the alleged victim's testimony, prosecutors had to rely in part on a witness, Lisa Van Allen, who said she engaged in three-way sex with Kelly and the girl. The woman claimed she sought hundreds of thousands of dollars from Kelly in exchange for her silence, thus getting labeled by defense lawyers as extortionist.
While the man on the tape didn't have a large mole on his back, as Kelly does, jurors said the mole argument rarely came up in deliberations and played no role in their verdict.
Puzzling the jury even more was that three relatives of the alleged victim testified they did not recognize her as the female on the tape, while other relatives said that it was her.
According to Assistant Cook County State's Attorney Shauna Boliker, she believed the female on the tape was a victim, not a prostitute as the defense had contended.
“This shows the world how difficult this crime is to prosecute,” she said. “It also takes the soul of the victim, the heart of the victim.”
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