Convicted singer R. Kelly’s $679,000 royalties ordered to be given to victims
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US singer R. Kelly is currently in a federal prison in Butner, North Carolina.
PHOTO: REUTERS
NEW YORK – American singer R. Kelly’s royalties of more than US$500,000 (S$679,000) held by Universal Music Group must be turned over to his sexual abuse victims, a United States judge ruled.
US District Judge Ann Donnelly in Brooklyn, New York, signed an order on Wednesday directing Universal Music Group to turn over the money to satisfy unpaid restitution and fines that the R&B star still owes.
Judge Donnelly previously ordered Kelly, whose full name is Robert Sylvester Kelly, to surrender almost US$28,000 in his prison inmate account and apply it to his unpaid fines.
The judge imposed the fines on the singer in 2022, when she sentenced him to 30 years in prison for racketeering and sexual exploitation of minors.
Kelly, 56, was separately convicted in a federal child pornography case in Chicago and sentenced to 20 years’ jail, most of which will run concurrently with the Brooklyn sentence.
He is now in a federal prison in Butner, North Carolina. It is not clear whether he has a lawyer representing him.
Kelly’s lawyers complained in 2022 that US federal prosecutors had taken the unprecedented step of seizing the singer’s prison inmate account, arguing they had failed to prove he had defaulted on paying fines and restitution to his victims.
The judge later rejected their argument that prosecutors acted prematurely when they froze all but US$500 in Kelly’s prison inmate account. Bloomberg
