R Kelly arrested again federal sex trafficking charges

R. Kelly has been arrested on federal sex crime charges, according to multiple US news outlets.

Kelly was arrested Thursday in Chicago on charges contained in a 13-count indictment returned in the Northern District of Illinois. Joseph Fitzpatrick, a spokesperson for The U.S. Attorney’s Office of the Northern District, says the indictment includes charges of illegal child tapes and obstruction of justice.

He was arrested after the federal indictment was handed down earlier Thursday in federal court for the Northern District of Illinois.

The latest charges are on top of previous sexual charges levelled against the R&B singer who pled no guilty to 11 felonies in charges brought by the Cook County prosecutors.

The 52-year-old Grammy winner, whose real name is Robert Kelly, was arrested in February on 10 counts in Illinois involving four women, three of whom were minors when the alleged abuse occurred. He pled not guilty to those charges and was released on bail.

Then on May 30, Cook County prosecutors added 11 more sex-related counts against the R&B singer involving one of the women who accused him of sexually abusing her when she was underage.

Kelly trouble started after Lifetime aired a documentary, Surviving R. Kelly, which revisited allegations of sexual abuse of girls. The series followed the BBC’s R Kelly: Sex, Girls & Videotapes, released in 2018, that alleged the singer was holding women against their will and running a “sex cult.”

Soon after the release of the Lifetime documentary, Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx said her office had been inundated with calls about the allegations in the documentary. Her office’s investigation led to the charges in February and additional counts added in May.