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R. Kelly is asking to cut short his 30-plus-year sentence for racketeering, sexual abuse and child pornography based on strange new claims that jail officials tried to solicit a fellow inmate to kill him.
The disgraced R&B star made the eyebrow-raising allegations in a Tuesday (June 10) court filing asking to be released from the Federal Correctional Institution in Butner, N.C., where he’s serving multiple decades after being convicted in two separate criminal cases.
Kelly claims he’s no longer safe behind bars because prison officials are trying to have him killed to keep from revealing prosecutorial misconduct he recently uncovered — namely, that his pre-trial cellmate stole his attorney-client communications and shared these private messages with prosecutors.
According to the motion, prison officials tried to stop this damaging information from getting out by soliciting fellow inmate Mikeal Glenn Stine, a member of the Aryan Brotherhood prison gang, to kill Kelly. Kelly’s lawyers say that while Stine ultimately did not go through with the alleged assignment, the threat still lingers.
“More A.B. members are accumulating at his facility,” reads the filing. “More than one has already been approached about carrying out his murder. One of them will surely do what Mr. Stine has not, thereby burying the truth about what happened in this case along with Robert Kelly.”
The motion includes signed declarations from both Stine and Kelly’s former cellmate. In a statement shared with Billboard, Kelly’s attorney, Beau Brindley, said, “The evidence we have before us demonstrates the weaponization of the D.O.J. to pursue a public figure through corrupt and criminal means.”
Brindley added that Kelly’s legal team is seeking clemency from President Donald Trump, saying Trump “is the only one with both the power and the courage” to curb such alleged prosecutorial corruption.
Prosecutors did not immediately return a request for comment on the motion, but they quickly filed papers of their own asking Judge Martha M. Pacold to strike Kelly’s filing, which contained the name of a child victim who was anonymized during his trial.
“Robert Kelly is a serial sexual predator,” wrote prosecutors. “He even documented his sexual abuse of children on film — creating child pornography — such that the abuse would live on in perpetuity. That abuse and harassment continues with defendant’s latest filing.”
Judge Pacold struck the motion as requested and ordered Kelly’s team to refile it with the victim’s name properly redacted. The judge set a hearing on the matter for Wednesday (June 11) in Chicago.
Kelly was convicted of a slew of sex crimes at two separate federal trials. A New York jury found him guilty of racketeering and sex trafficking in 2021, and he was convicted of child pornography and enticing minors for sex in Chicago in 2022.
The former R&B star was sentenced to 30 years in prison for the New York conviction and 20 years in the Chicago case, although the vast majority of the second sentence will overlap with the first. Both convictions have been upheld on appeal.
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