R. Kelly was sentenced to 30 years in prison on 29 June 2022 for sexual abuse cases but the allegations against him span decades. Here, we trace R. Kelly sexual abuse allegations timeline as they have been mentioned one time or the other.
1994: Aaliyah
On 31 August 1994, R. Kelly illegally married late singer Aaliyah when she was just 15 in Cook County, Illinois. Although, it only came out in 2021 during a witness testimony, the singer was said to have been having sexual relations with her since she was around 13 or 14 years old. She later had the marriage annulled in 1997 after she confessed that she lied about her age, claiming to be 18 when she had been 15.
1996: Tiffany Hawkins
Long before social media began to torchlight celebrity lives, R. Kelly had faced a civil suit filed by Tiffany Hawkins, who claimed that the singer had engaged her in intercourse starting from when she was 15. He had settled the case in 1998 for $250,000 but in 2000, a Chicago Sun-Times article mentioned that the police had to drop two cases against Kelly because the victims were not willing to confront him.
2002: leaked video and underage material
In 2002, a viral video showed a man (said to be R. Kelly) engaged in dehumanizing sexual fetishes with an underage girl. In the video, the man was urinating on the girl but Kelly said that he was not the man in the video.
Still in the same year, he was arrested for possessing adult materials of underage girls and he posted bail of $750,000 before he was released the next day. He would later be found not guilty in 2008.
In 2003, he was arrested again for possessing underage girls materials but he was released that same day and in 2004, the charges were dropped.
2009: Andrea Lee divorce
During his divorce from Lee, she accused Kelly of abusing a preteen girl. However, the details of the divorce were sealed at the time and was only unsealed in 2020.
2010s: sex cult
In 2015, during a live interview for Huffington Post, which was aimed at promoting his thirteenth album titled The Buffet, R. Kelly found himself on the end of a question that resurrected his past sexual abuse cases.
His reaction was suspect because he grew angry at Caroline Modarressy-Tehrani, and instead of seizing the moment to convince the public of his innocence, he started shouting at the journalist and threatened to walk out of the interview.
In 2017, three sets of parents accused the singer of holding their daughters hostage in some sort of sex cult. However, the case could not go forward because the girls themselves denied any wrongdoing.
Yet, the following year, a former partner of the singer came out to accuse him of intentionally infecting her with an STD to have some control over her. And in 2019, Asante McGee, who also briefly lived with the singer said that while they lived together, they were not alone. She and Kelly lived with other women, McGee claimed, and he controlled every aspect of her life.
2019: Cook County arrest
In February 2019, Kelly turned himself in to the police after the Cook County State Attorney Office charged him with 10 counts of sexual abuse crimes. The allegations mention charges from 1998 to 2010 and included four females (three teen minors) and a video evidence.
He was released after three nights and ordered not to have contact with anyone under the age of 18 and the alleged victims. The bail was set at $1 million.
