R Kelly paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to try to buy back child porn videos that allegedly went missing in the early 2000s, a court has heard.
The disgraced singer and his inner circle splashed out the huge sum on trying to recover the lost recordings, prosecutors claimed.
In testimony heard at the trial in Chicago on Monday an IRS agent went through payments check by check.
The mother of one of his accusers told the court how she and her husband were left fearing for their lives when the singer confronted them over their allegations.
She told told jurors she lied to a state grand jury 20 years ago in part because she and her husband felt threatened by Kelly if they told the truth.
Using the pseudonym, ‘Susan,’ she told how she and her husband confronted Kelly at a hotel in the early 2000s about whether he was abusing their daughter.
She testified that they were startled when the singer told them, ‘You are with us or against us.’
She said she took those words to mean ‘that they were going to harm us if we didn’t do what they wanted us to do.’
Among the directives from Kelly and an associate was that they had to lie that their daughter was not in a child pornography video and that they had to leave the country immediately for several weeks, she testified.
‘We were very, very frightened,’ she told jurors.
She added later that she lied to the grand jury ‘because we feared for our lives and we were intimidated.’
She said she also feared for the well-being of her daughter, who warned her parents at the time she might commit suicide if they refused to do what Kelly asked of them.
Kelly, 55, is on trial in his hometown on charges that include production of child pornography, enticing minor girls for sex and obstruction justice by successfully rigging his 2008 child pornography trial in state court, at which he was acquitted.
Kelly is already staring at a 30-year prison sentence imposed by a federal judge in New York in June for his 2021 convictions on racketeering and sex trafficking charges.
Susan’s daughter, ‘Jane,’ was among the prosecution’s first witnesses as the trial began last week.
Jane told jurors she also lied to the same grand jury prior to 2008 trial when she said she was not the 14-year-old girl in a video with Kelly.
Jane, now 37, told jurors last week that, in fact, she had been sexually abused hundreds of times by Kelly before she had turned at 18.
In a cross-examination on Monday, Kelly attorney Jennifer Bonjean repeatedly questioned Susan about whether she truly felt her life was in any danger from Kelly or his associates.
‘No one actually threatened you, did they?’ Bonjean asked. ‘Yes, they did,’ Susan answered.
Bonjean also asked why, if Susan felt so threatened by Kelly, she and her family continued to mix with Kelly socially for the next 20 years.
She answered that Kelly was their sole income for a period, paying her musician husband to work on Kelly recordings.
She also said she worried about Jane’s welfare if they cut ties with Kelly. The husband, Jane’s father, died last year, she told jurors.
During her cross, Bonjean highlighted Susan’s testimony that she lied to the Illinois grand jury, asking if she was ‘telling the truth now.’ Susan said she was.
