A federal court in Chicago (USA) has sentenced the singer R. Kelly to 20 years in prison for sexual abuse of minors, although he will serve most of this sentence simultaneously with the 30 years in prison than a court of NY imposed last June for other crimes.

The federal judge of the court of the Northern District of Illinois (Chicago), Harry D. Leinenweber, has explained that Kelly will serve 19 of the 20 years in prison to which he was sentenced at the same time as the previous sentence. The year in prison that he would miss will be completed the year after completing the previous sentence.

In this way, Kelly (56 years old), sentenced this Thursday for three crimes of sexual abuse of minors and three of child pornographywill spend a total of 31 years behind bars.

This was one of the demands of the defense of the interpreter of “I Believe I Can Fly“Which argued that the artist was already fulfilling”de facto life sentence” and that in the “unlikely” event that he survived, there was “no reason” to think that he would reoffend as “a man over 80 years of age”.

The Chicago trial was based on the allegations of five minors who were abused by Kelly in the late 1990s and even four of them were filmed in explicit videos.

“Hundreds of Sex Acts”

One of the witnesses during the trial, a now 37-year-old woman, spoke in court under the pseudonym Jane and testified that Kelly forced her to “hundreds of sexual acts“from 15 to 18 years old.

Before knowing the sentence, the lawyer for this victim, Christopher Brown, read another statement from Jane in which she assured having lost their “dignity”, “dreams” and “adolescence” because of the abuses of the singer.

“I will forever be the girl R. Kelly urinated on”expressed about the recording provided during the trial with the singer’s harassment of the then minor.

Prosecutors defined the R&B star as “a serial sexual predator” that it focused “specifically on little girls” and did “everything possible” to hide the abuse.

Kelly was previously sentenced in New York for organized crime, abuse and sex trafficking, for which he is currently deprived of liberty in a jail in that city.

The New York trial lasted six weeks, with dozens of witnesses, and in it, prosecutors argued that he used his “celebrity status” to create a “network of girls and women at his disposal.”

To this day, Kelly – one of the most renowned R&B artists of the 1990s and 2000s, with three Grammys in his record – refuses to accept responsibility for any of the crimes for which he has been convicted.