09-27-2021, 09:26 PM
FIRST: THE EEJIT WHOM BOUGHT A CANCER DRUG FOR LITTLE AND CHARGED A FORTUNE IS BUSTED WITH IMPUGNITY. New Documentary Confirms Martin Shkreli Is Just an Evil Little Prick
TROLL
The new documentary “Pharmo Bro” tries to find sympathy for the smirking pharmaceutical price-gouger/convict, but fails entirely.
Nick Schager
Published Sep. 27, 2021 4:53AM ET
Spencer Platt/Getty
Listen to article
7 minutes
No one likes Martin Shkreli, and Pharma Bro isn’t going to change that. More frustrating, however, is that director Brent Hodge’s documentary (on VOD Oct. 5) provides scant insight into the notorious price-gouger who in 2015 made national headlines after his pharmaceutical firm Turing acquired Daraprim—a drug designed to treat toxoplasmosis in AIDS patients, pregnant women, and cancer sufferers—and promptly increased its per-pill cost from $13.50 to $750. If you’re familiar with the story of Shkreli, you know what Hodge’s film has to offer: namely, a lot of Shkreli smirking in photos, being rude to reporters, and staging confrontational livestreams in which he does his best to play the part of a Big Pharma supervillain.
Hodge wants to investigate Shkreli as both an everyday guy and as a comic-book baddie à la Doctor Doom, Lex Luthor, and the Joker, with the latter vein addressed by Henderson State University professor of psychology Dr. Travis Langley from inside Brooklyn’s St. Mark’s Comics, as well as underlined by occasional superhero-style graphics. In those passages, Langley opines about the motivations and desires of the Penguin and the Riddler, suggesting that Shkreli maybe just needs a friend. Such ideas, alas, don’t hold much weight in the context of Pharma Bro, which is largely a compendium of clips, news articles and interviews that paint him as the embodiment of unchecked capitalistic greed and 21st-century online trolling.
The Bombshell That Blew Up Two Lesbian Moms’ Loving Family
LOOKING BACK
Nick Schager
To get closer to Shkreli, Hodge follows him around NYC and, eventually, moves into his apartment building, all while endlessly watching the livestreams Shkreli broadcasts from his home, during which he gives out his phone number and takes calls from strangers (many of whom he berates), plays guitar, chats with his cat, brashly counters (if not outright harasses) his critics, and says a lot of obnoxious and outrageous things in order to get a rise out of people. Friends like rapper Billy the Fridge opine about how Shkreli knowingly plays the part of the antagonist in some modern-media spectacle of his own making, and the footage on display confirms this—the eagerness with which Shkreli pokes at everyone and anyone who dares talk about, or to, him is so extreme that it comes across as a put-on. Shkreli leans into the hate, embraces it, and then spews it right back at those hurling it his way.
Pharma Bro uses Shkreli’s livestreams as a means of letting the man tell his own tale, but Hodge thinks there’s something even deeper lurking beneath this public image—a real Martin Shkreli who’s presumably more sensitive, or earnest, or generous, or humane. Daraprim patient Patrick Rice discusses how, via an online AMA, he asked Shkreli about the high price of his medicine, and wound up getting it for free courtesy of the Turin bigwig. The suggestion is that Shkreli was telling the truth when he claimed that the drug’s astronomical price wouldn’t prevent those in need from receiving it. That anecdote aside, however, the film offers up no evidence that Shkreli is someone other than who he made himself out to be for the cameras and the courtroom, where he was convicted in 2017 of a separate offense—that of fraud related to his hedge fund businesses, landing him seven years in jail—after his lawyers first had to dismiss over 200 potential jurors from the trial for having an innate bias against their client.
Meanwhile, Ghostface Killah appears on-camera to chat about Shkreli’s other claim to infamy: spending $2 million on the sole copy of Wu-Tang Clan’s mythic album Once Upon a Time in Shaolin. Regarding the man’s supervillain reputation, as well as their public TMZ-fueled feud, Ghostface states, “He’s not that dude. And I’m not one to promote violence. But for him? I don’t give a fuck.” Pharma Bro will similarly not make anyone care much about Shkreli, although alt-right activist Milo Yiannopoulos and former Bloomberg reporter Christie Smythe do deliver less-than-disparaging commentary about him. Then again, since Yiannopoulos is a white nationalist provocateur who’s seen splashing around in a bathtub full of blood at an NYC art show, and Smythe fell in love with Shkreli and is now his fiancée, these aren’t the respectable, objective voices likely to sway most.
Pharma Bro assembles an expansive collection of headlines, courtroom sketches, and Shkreli TV appearances and tweets in the process capturing the highly contemporary way in which Shkreli exploited modern media outlets for his own fame. Rarely has anyone believed more strongly that all press is good press. Yet there’s not much here that hasn’t already been seen or heard before, and certainly no novel perspective that throws this saga into a fresh light. In search of the authentic Shkreli, Hodge even travels to the Albanian town of Shkrel, whose inhabitants all assume its name, and who profess to the director that they’re proud of Shkreli for his accomplishments in America. In terms of meaningful revelations, though, what the director turns up is a whole lot of nothing.
“In search of the authentic Shkreli, Hodge even travels to the Albanian town of Shkrel, whose inhabitants all assume its name, and who profess to the director that they’re proud of Shkreli for his accomplishments in America.”
The overriding impression left by Pharma Bro is that the Shkreli everyone has grown to loathe is the only Shkreli that exists. Hodge is so desperate for first-hand contact that he ultimately introduces himself to Shkreli on the street, and later rings his doorbell and offers him a six-pack of beer, thereby netting himself some brief time in Shkreli’s apartment. Yet the faint glimmers of normalcy spied in these interactions aren’t enough to imply that Shkreli is a more complicated or sympathetic figure than we’ve been led to believe. The film merely reaffirms that he’s an ambitious entrepreneur who saw a financial opportunity and exploited it to the hilt, and then doubled-down when calls for his head rang out. To paraphrase former Arizona Cardinals head coach Dennis Green, he is exactly who we thought he was.
Pharma Bro concludes by underlining that Shkreli’s story is really an argument for stricter drug-pricing controls, and it’s hard to imagine most viewers disagreeing with that assessment. When it comes to Shkreli himself, however, the film proves more of a surface-level rehash than an illuminating exposé.
SECONDLY: R KELLY GOES DOWN FOR SEXUAL ABUSE AND TRAFFICKING CHARGES?
READ THIS LIST
R. Kelly Convicted of Sex Crimes. It Only Took 30 Years.
PILAR MELENDEZ
What Matt Gaetz’s Legal Lineup Tells Us About His Troubles
ROGER SOLLENBERGER
Cops Who Pulled Over Van-Lifers Were Told Fiancé Hit Petito
JUSTIN ROHRLICH
India Is Hiding a Nightmare Snakebite Massacre
HANAN ZAFFAR
Teen Wrestling Champ Gunned Down While Sitting in Her Car
ZOE RICHARDS
CRIME & JUSTICE
R. Kelly Convicted of Sex Crimes. It Only Took 30 Years.
END GAME
After six weeks of testimony and 50 witnesses, the singer who dodged child porn charges was found guilty.
Pilar Melendez
National Reporter
Updated Sep. 27, 2021 5:12PM ET Published Sep. 27, 2021 3:21PM ET
Scott Olson/Getty
Listen to article
11 minutes
For decades, R. Kelly has been accused of various harrowing acts, ranging from sexual abuse to luring young women into an alleged “cult.”
But despite scores of allegations—and even a high-profile criminal trial on child pornography charges—the Grammy-winning singer always seemed to dodge serious repercussions.
On Monday, after two years of delays spurred by a global pandemic and countless legal hurdles, Kelly was convicted of leading a criminal enterprise geared at helping him prey on women and girls for his own sexual gratification.
Kelly, 54, was convicted on all the charges he faced in Brooklyn federal court, including racketeering based on sexual exploitation of children, kidnapping, forced labor, and violations of the Mann Act, which bars the transport of people across state lines for sex. Kelly’s legal team, for their part, argued that the singer’s sexual encounters were all consensual and that those who spoke out against the singer were merely disgruntled exes with an agenda.
After six weeks of testimony and 50 witnesses, the 12 jurors responsible for Kelly’s criminal fate reached a verdict after nine hours of deliberation. Kelly is now facing decades in prison—he will be sentenced next May—not to mention pending federal and state charges in Chicago and Minnesota.
As the foreman read the verdict against Kelly, the disgraced singer sat stoically and stared straight ahead of him. After the verdict, Kelly walked out of the courtroom—without handcuffs—and an attorney for the singer told The Daily Beast they were “disappointed” with the outcome.
The conviction marks the latest #MeToo-era prosecutorial win against once-untouchable men who previously slipped through the legal system, after the conviction of serial rapist Harvey Weinstein.
“It isn’t easy to convict celebrities in this country, especially of sex abuse. Think back to Michael Jackson,” Neama Rahman, a former federal prosecutor, told The Daily Beast.
“A conviction will also empower other victims of sex abuse to come forward,” he added. “They’ll know they are not alone and that prosecutors will pursue their cases aggressively, regardless of the perpetrator’s celebrity status.”
The verdict also marks the second time Brooklyn federal prosecutors have successfully used a federal racketeering case, a statute commonly referred to by the acronym RICO, to take down a sexual predator. The same racketeering charge was employed in the prosecution of Keith Raniere, where Brooklyn prosecutors proved that the NXIVM “sex cult” leader was at the helm of a criminal enterprise enabling his own predation.
Inside R. Kelly’s Secret Marriage to 15-Year-Old Aaliyah
‘DIDN’T UNDERSTAND’
Pilar Melendez
“The law recognizes when someone commits a crime as part of a group, he’s more powerful—more dangerous,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Elizabeth Geddes told jurors during her closing arguments.
She added, “without his inner circle, the defendant could not have carried out the crimes he carried out for as long as he did.”
Outside the courthouse, Brooklyn federal prosecutors applauded the jury for a swift verdict that “begins the healing process for these young survivors,” as one put it.
They also commended the 11 men and women who spoke out against Kelly, who they called “a predator who used his fame and fortune to prey on the young, the vulnerable, and the voiceless for his own gratification.”
Throughout the trial, prosecutors argued that for decades, the disgraced R&B singer led a criminal enterprise consisting of bodyguards, drivers, and other employees.
“Just because you have one of your henchmen do your dirty work doesn’t make you any less responsible,” Geddes said.
To prove the case, nine women and two men took to the stand to discuss the abuse they endured at the hands of the singer. Almost all of the individuals who testified were under the age of 18 when they first had sexual contact with Kelly.
Among the women who testified was Jane, who testified about her harrowing five-year relationship with Kelly that began when she was 17.
During her three-day testimony, Jane said Kelly would make her and his other girlfriends wear baggy clothing, call him “Daddy,” and shield themselves from other men. If they did not follow these rules, Jane said, she and another girlfriend would be punished.
“He had mentioned rules… protocols that I would have to abide by in his presence,” Jane told jurors.
“He would control every single time we were intimate,” she later added. “He told me to walk back and forth and that’s what I would have to do until he gave me another direction.”
Among the punishments, she said, was being kept in a room for three days after buying the wrong-sized Hollister sweatpants and beaten with a size-12 Air Force 1 shoe for lying to the singer. In 2017, she said, the singer also forced her to have an abortion in an effort to “keep her body tight.
FREDERIC J. BROWN/AFP Via Getty
In what was probably the most horrifying episode of the trial, Jane broke down on the stand as she described Kelly making her smear feces on her mouth and eat it on video as punishment for disobeying one of his rules.
“He told me to smear it in my face and what to exactly say and to, like, put it in my mouth and act like I liked, enjoyed that,” she told jurors.
Several other women also testified about being sexually assaulted by Kelly, including one accuser who said she was assaulted by him after being locked in his studio for days. After the assault, she told jurors, she was threatened by one of Kelly’s associates to stay quiet and not to “fuck with Mr. Kelly.”
Another accuser told jurors that Kelly forced her to have sex in a Miami dressing room after one of his shows in September 1994—when she was just 17 years old.
The alleged assault occurred just two days after Kelly’s secret marriage to Aaliyah. Prosecutors said that Kelly bribed an Illinois official in order to obtain a fake ID for the “Princess of R&B,” who was just 15 years old at the time of their Aug. 31, 1994 wedding.
The trial also provided new details about the controversial marriage, including that the wedding occurred after Aaliyah believed she was pregnant. On Wednesday, Geddes took it a step further, arguing that the true reason Kelly wanted to marry Aaliyah was to make sure “she would get an abortion.” At the time, the “Princess of R&B” was 15, and Kelly was 27.
“No baby, no jail,” Geddes added.
In Feb. 1996, Aaliyah’s marriage to Kelly was annulled by her parents.
Kelly also allegedly preyed on at least two John Does when they were minors, including “Louis,” who told jurors he met the singer at a Chicago McDonald’s drive-thru in 2006. He said that during his over 10-year relationship with Kelly, which began when he was 17, the singer sexually assaulted him multiple times after promising to help with his music career.
“He asked what I was willing to do for the music,” Louis, 32, told jurors. “He crawled down on his knees to me and proceeded to give me oral sex.”
“As our relationship got stronger, he said I was like a brother. I was his little brother,” he later said, adding that Kelly asked him to call him “Daddy,” echoing testimony from multiple female accusers.
The second John Doe, whom Kelly met when he was 16 or 17, was also allegedly forced to have filmed sex with the singer and several of his girlfriends. Kelly is not charged for the alleged crimes against the two males.
The defense had a different take on the slew of allegations laid out by the prosecution. During closing arguments, an attorney argued that Kelly’s accusers had all previously lied to prosecutors and that they all had an ax to grind.
The defense called five witnesses to the stand. Most of them were employees of Kelly, who said they never heard women banging on doors or being physically abused.
“They were lying and you know they were lying,” defense attorney Deveraux Cannick said on Thursday. “Just lie after lie after lie. The government let them lie.”
“Where is the fairness to Robert? Where is the integrity in the system?” he added.
Some of Kelly’s supporters, who had been in court throughout the six-week trial, told The Daily Beast they were “heartbroken” by the verdict—and one blamed a “corrupt government who wanted to go after a superstar.”
“It’s appalling that the government just sat there as they allowed their witnesses lie on the stand,” Tina Brown, a 49-year-old Los Angeles resident who described herself as a relative of the singer, told The Daily Beast Monday.
Echoing the defense team’s final argument that all those who testified during the trial were “liars,” Brown added that she found it convenient that the government “now starts caring about listening to Black women.”
Another supporter, who was wearing a t-shirt with Kelly’s case next to a large speaker playing the singer’s music, simply yelled to The Daily Beast: “We’re not giving up on R Kelly! All the way to appeal, the government are lying.”
In a last-ditch effort to prove Kelly’s innocence at trial, Cannick, the defense attorney, had compared his client to Martin Luther King Jr., Playboy founder Hugh Hefner, and, most bizarrely, former Vice President Mike Pence.
Antonio Perez/Pool via Getty
“His label made him a sex symbol and playboy. Where is the crime in that?” Cannick said, before comparing his client to the Playboy founder. “Hugh Hefner, that was his life—not a crime. Not a crime.”
Prosecutors, however, quickly shut down the defense’s implication that those who took the stand “were asking for it and they deserved what they got—never mind they were teenagers, too young to consent.”
“It’s as if we took a time machine and went back to a courtroom in the 1950s,” Assistant District Attorney Nadia Shihata said. “It’s not just absurd, it’s shameful.”
TROLL
The new documentary “Pharmo Bro” tries to find sympathy for the smirking pharmaceutical price-gouger/convict, but fails entirely.
Nick Schager
Published Sep. 27, 2021 4:53AM ET
Spencer Platt/Getty
Listen to article
7 minutes
No one likes Martin Shkreli, and Pharma Bro isn’t going to change that. More frustrating, however, is that director Brent Hodge’s documentary (on VOD Oct. 5) provides scant insight into the notorious price-gouger who in 2015 made national headlines after his pharmaceutical firm Turing acquired Daraprim—a drug designed to treat toxoplasmosis in AIDS patients, pregnant women, and cancer sufferers—and promptly increased its per-pill cost from $13.50 to $750. If you’re familiar with the story of Shkreli, you know what Hodge’s film has to offer: namely, a lot of Shkreli smirking in photos, being rude to reporters, and staging confrontational livestreams in which he does his best to play the part of a Big Pharma supervillain.
Hodge wants to investigate Shkreli as both an everyday guy and as a comic-book baddie à la Doctor Doom, Lex Luthor, and the Joker, with the latter vein addressed by Henderson State University professor of psychology Dr. Travis Langley from inside Brooklyn’s St. Mark’s Comics, as well as underlined by occasional superhero-style graphics. In those passages, Langley opines about the motivations and desires of the Penguin and the Riddler, suggesting that Shkreli maybe just needs a friend. Such ideas, alas, don’t hold much weight in the context of Pharma Bro, which is largely a compendium of clips, news articles and interviews that paint him as the embodiment of unchecked capitalistic greed and 21st-century online trolling.
The Bombshell That Blew Up Two Lesbian Moms’ Loving Family
LOOKING BACK
Nick Schager
To get closer to Shkreli, Hodge follows him around NYC and, eventually, moves into his apartment building, all while endlessly watching the livestreams Shkreli broadcasts from his home, during which he gives out his phone number and takes calls from strangers (many of whom he berates), plays guitar, chats with his cat, brashly counters (if not outright harasses) his critics, and says a lot of obnoxious and outrageous things in order to get a rise out of people. Friends like rapper Billy the Fridge opine about how Shkreli knowingly plays the part of the antagonist in some modern-media spectacle of his own making, and the footage on display confirms this—the eagerness with which Shkreli pokes at everyone and anyone who dares talk about, or to, him is so extreme that it comes across as a put-on. Shkreli leans into the hate, embraces it, and then spews it right back at those hurling it his way.
Pharma Bro uses Shkreli’s livestreams as a means of letting the man tell his own tale, but Hodge thinks there’s something even deeper lurking beneath this public image—a real Martin Shkreli who’s presumably more sensitive, or earnest, or generous, or humane. Daraprim patient Patrick Rice discusses how, via an online AMA, he asked Shkreli about the high price of his medicine, and wound up getting it for free courtesy of the Turin bigwig. The suggestion is that Shkreli was telling the truth when he claimed that the drug’s astronomical price wouldn’t prevent those in need from receiving it. That anecdote aside, however, the film offers up no evidence that Shkreli is someone other than who he made himself out to be for the cameras and the courtroom, where he was convicted in 2017 of a separate offense—that of fraud related to his hedge fund businesses, landing him seven years in jail—after his lawyers first had to dismiss over 200 potential jurors from the trial for having an innate bias against their client.
Meanwhile, Ghostface Killah appears on-camera to chat about Shkreli’s other claim to infamy: spending $2 million on the sole copy of Wu-Tang Clan’s mythic album Once Upon a Time in Shaolin. Regarding the man’s supervillain reputation, as well as their public TMZ-fueled feud, Ghostface states, “He’s not that dude. And I’m not one to promote violence. But for him? I don’t give a fuck.” Pharma Bro will similarly not make anyone care much about Shkreli, although alt-right activist Milo Yiannopoulos and former Bloomberg reporter Christie Smythe do deliver less-than-disparaging commentary about him. Then again, since Yiannopoulos is a white nationalist provocateur who’s seen splashing around in a bathtub full of blood at an NYC art show, and Smythe fell in love with Shkreli and is now his fiancée, these aren’t the respectable, objective voices likely to sway most.
Pharma Bro assembles an expansive collection of headlines, courtroom sketches, and Shkreli TV appearances and tweets in the process capturing the highly contemporary way in which Shkreli exploited modern media outlets for his own fame. Rarely has anyone believed more strongly that all press is good press. Yet there’s not much here that hasn’t already been seen or heard before, and certainly no novel perspective that throws this saga into a fresh light. In search of the authentic Shkreli, Hodge even travels to the Albanian town of Shkrel, whose inhabitants all assume its name, and who profess to the director that they’re proud of Shkreli for his accomplishments in America. In terms of meaningful revelations, though, what the director turns up is a whole lot of nothing.
“In search of the authentic Shkreli, Hodge even travels to the Albanian town of Shkrel, whose inhabitants all assume its name, and who profess to the director that they’re proud of Shkreli for his accomplishments in America.”
The overriding impression left by Pharma Bro is that the Shkreli everyone has grown to loathe is the only Shkreli that exists. Hodge is so desperate for first-hand contact that he ultimately introduces himself to Shkreli on the street, and later rings his doorbell and offers him a six-pack of beer, thereby netting himself some brief time in Shkreli’s apartment. Yet the faint glimmers of normalcy spied in these interactions aren’t enough to imply that Shkreli is a more complicated or sympathetic figure than we’ve been led to believe. The film merely reaffirms that he’s an ambitious entrepreneur who saw a financial opportunity and exploited it to the hilt, and then doubled-down when calls for his head rang out. To paraphrase former Arizona Cardinals head coach Dennis Green, he is exactly who we thought he was.
Pharma Bro concludes by underlining that Shkreli’s story is really an argument for stricter drug-pricing controls, and it’s hard to imagine most viewers disagreeing with that assessment. When it comes to Shkreli himself, however, the film proves more of a surface-level rehash than an illuminating exposé.
SECONDLY: R KELLY GOES DOWN FOR SEXUAL ABUSE AND TRAFFICKING CHARGES?
READ THIS LIST
R. Kelly Convicted of Sex Crimes. It Only Took 30 Years.
PILAR MELENDEZ
What Matt Gaetz’s Legal Lineup Tells Us About His Troubles
ROGER SOLLENBERGER
Cops Who Pulled Over Van-Lifers Were Told Fiancé Hit Petito
JUSTIN ROHRLICH
India Is Hiding a Nightmare Snakebite Massacre
HANAN ZAFFAR
Teen Wrestling Champ Gunned Down While Sitting in Her Car
ZOE RICHARDS
CRIME & JUSTICE
R. Kelly Convicted of Sex Crimes. It Only Took 30 Years.
END GAME
After six weeks of testimony and 50 witnesses, the singer who dodged child porn charges was found guilty.
Pilar Melendez
National Reporter
Updated Sep. 27, 2021 5:12PM ET Published Sep. 27, 2021 3:21PM ET
Scott Olson/Getty
Listen to article
11 minutes
For decades, R. Kelly has been accused of various harrowing acts, ranging from sexual abuse to luring young women into an alleged “cult.”
But despite scores of allegations—and even a high-profile criminal trial on child pornography charges—the Grammy-winning singer always seemed to dodge serious repercussions.
On Monday, after two years of delays spurred by a global pandemic and countless legal hurdles, Kelly was convicted of leading a criminal enterprise geared at helping him prey on women and girls for his own sexual gratification.
Kelly, 54, was convicted on all the charges he faced in Brooklyn federal court, including racketeering based on sexual exploitation of children, kidnapping, forced labor, and violations of the Mann Act, which bars the transport of people across state lines for sex. Kelly’s legal team, for their part, argued that the singer’s sexual encounters were all consensual and that those who spoke out against the singer were merely disgruntled exes with an agenda.
After six weeks of testimony and 50 witnesses, the 12 jurors responsible for Kelly’s criminal fate reached a verdict after nine hours of deliberation. Kelly is now facing decades in prison—he will be sentenced next May—not to mention pending federal and state charges in Chicago and Minnesota.
As the foreman read the verdict against Kelly, the disgraced singer sat stoically and stared straight ahead of him. After the verdict, Kelly walked out of the courtroom—without handcuffs—and an attorney for the singer told The Daily Beast they were “disappointed” with the outcome.
The conviction marks the latest #MeToo-era prosecutorial win against once-untouchable men who previously slipped through the legal system, after the conviction of serial rapist Harvey Weinstein.
“It isn’t easy to convict celebrities in this country, especially of sex abuse. Think back to Michael Jackson,” Neama Rahman, a former federal prosecutor, told The Daily Beast.
“A conviction will also empower other victims of sex abuse to come forward,” he added. “They’ll know they are not alone and that prosecutors will pursue their cases aggressively, regardless of the perpetrator’s celebrity status.”
The verdict also marks the second time Brooklyn federal prosecutors have successfully used a federal racketeering case, a statute commonly referred to by the acronym RICO, to take down a sexual predator. The same racketeering charge was employed in the prosecution of Keith Raniere, where Brooklyn prosecutors proved that the NXIVM “sex cult” leader was at the helm of a criminal enterprise enabling his own predation.
Inside R. Kelly’s Secret Marriage to 15-Year-Old Aaliyah
‘DIDN’T UNDERSTAND’
Pilar Melendez
“The law recognizes when someone commits a crime as part of a group, he’s more powerful—more dangerous,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Elizabeth Geddes told jurors during her closing arguments.
She added, “without his inner circle, the defendant could not have carried out the crimes he carried out for as long as he did.”
Outside the courthouse, Brooklyn federal prosecutors applauded the jury for a swift verdict that “begins the healing process for these young survivors,” as one put it.
They also commended the 11 men and women who spoke out against Kelly, who they called “a predator who used his fame and fortune to prey on the young, the vulnerable, and the voiceless for his own gratification.”
Throughout the trial, prosecutors argued that for decades, the disgraced R&B singer led a criminal enterprise consisting of bodyguards, drivers, and other employees.
“Just because you have one of your henchmen do your dirty work doesn’t make you any less responsible,” Geddes said.
To prove the case, nine women and two men took to the stand to discuss the abuse they endured at the hands of the singer. Almost all of the individuals who testified were under the age of 18 when they first had sexual contact with Kelly.
Among the women who testified was Jane, who testified about her harrowing five-year relationship with Kelly that began when she was 17.
During her three-day testimony, Jane said Kelly would make her and his other girlfriends wear baggy clothing, call him “Daddy,” and shield themselves from other men. If they did not follow these rules, Jane said, she and another girlfriend would be punished.
“He had mentioned rules… protocols that I would have to abide by in his presence,” Jane told jurors.
“He would control every single time we were intimate,” she later added. “He told me to walk back and forth and that’s what I would have to do until he gave me another direction.”
Among the punishments, she said, was being kept in a room for three days after buying the wrong-sized Hollister sweatpants and beaten with a size-12 Air Force 1 shoe for lying to the singer. In 2017, she said, the singer also forced her to have an abortion in an effort to “keep her body tight.
FREDERIC J. BROWN/AFP Via Getty
In what was probably the most horrifying episode of the trial, Jane broke down on the stand as she described Kelly making her smear feces on her mouth and eat it on video as punishment for disobeying one of his rules.
“He told me to smear it in my face and what to exactly say and to, like, put it in my mouth and act like I liked, enjoyed that,” she told jurors.
Several other women also testified about being sexually assaulted by Kelly, including one accuser who said she was assaulted by him after being locked in his studio for days. After the assault, she told jurors, she was threatened by one of Kelly’s associates to stay quiet and not to “fuck with Mr. Kelly.”
Another accuser told jurors that Kelly forced her to have sex in a Miami dressing room after one of his shows in September 1994—when she was just 17 years old.
The alleged assault occurred just two days after Kelly’s secret marriage to Aaliyah. Prosecutors said that Kelly bribed an Illinois official in order to obtain a fake ID for the “Princess of R&B,” who was just 15 years old at the time of their Aug. 31, 1994 wedding.
The trial also provided new details about the controversial marriage, including that the wedding occurred after Aaliyah believed she was pregnant. On Wednesday, Geddes took it a step further, arguing that the true reason Kelly wanted to marry Aaliyah was to make sure “she would get an abortion.” At the time, the “Princess of R&B” was 15, and Kelly was 27.
“No baby, no jail,” Geddes added.
In Feb. 1996, Aaliyah’s marriage to Kelly was annulled by her parents.
Kelly also allegedly preyed on at least two John Does when they were minors, including “Louis,” who told jurors he met the singer at a Chicago McDonald’s drive-thru in 2006. He said that during his over 10-year relationship with Kelly, which began when he was 17, the singer sexually assaulted him multiple times after promising to help with his music career.
“He asked what I was willing to do for the music,” Louis, 32, told jurors. “He crawled down on his knees to me and proceeded to give me oral sex.”
“As our relationship got stronger, he said I was like a brother. I was his little brother,” he later said, adding that Kelly asked him to call him “Daddy,” echoing testimony from multiple female accusers.
The second John Doe, whom Kelly met when he was 16 or 17, was also allegedly forced to have filmed sex with the singer and several of his girlfriends. Kelly is not charged for the alleged crimes against the two males.
The defense had a different take on the slew of allegations laid out by the prosecution. During closing arguments, an attorney argued that Kelly’s accusers had all previously lied to prosecutors and that they all had an ax to grind.
The defense called five witnesses to the stand. Most of them were employees of Kelly, who said they never heard women banging on doors or being physically abused.
“They were lying and you know they were lying,” defense attorney Deveraux Cannick said on Thursday. “Just lie after lie after lie. The government let them lie.”
“Where is the fairness to Robert? Where is the integrity in the system?” he added.
Some of Kelly’s supporters, who had been in court throughout the six-week trial, told The Daily Beast they were “heartbroken” by the verdict—and one blamed a “corrupt government who wanted to go after a superstar.”
“It’s appalling that the government just sat there as they allowed their witnesses lie on the stand,” Tina Brown, a 49-year-old Los Angeles resident who described herself as a relative of the singer, told The Daily Beast Monday.
Echoing the defense team’s final argument that all those who testified during the trial were “liars,” Brown added that she found it convenient that the government “now starts caring about listening to Black women.”
Another supporter, who was wearing a t-shirt with Kelly’s case next to a large speaker playing the singer’s music, simply yelled to The Daily Beast: “We’re not giving up on R Kelly! All the way to appeal, the government are lying.”
In a last-ditch effort to prove Kelly’s innocence at trial, Cannick, the defense attorney, had compared his client to Martin Luther King Jr., Playboy founder Hugh Hefner, and, most bizarrely, former Vice President Mike Pence.
Antonio Perez/Pool via Getty
“His label made him a sex symbol and playboy. Where is the crime in that?” Cannick said, before comparing his client to the Playboy founder. “Hugh Hefner, that was his life—not a crime. Not a crime.”
Prosecutors, however, quickly shut down the defense’s implication that those who took the stand “were asking for it and they deserved what they got—never mind they were teenagers, too young to consent.”
“It’s as if we took a time machine and went back to a courtroom in the 1950s,” Assistant District Attorney Nadia Shihata said. “It’s not just absurd, it’s shameful.”