Woman testifies R. Kelly sexually abused her at age 14

CHICAGO • A woman has identified herself and R. Kelly as the people in an old videotape that American prosecutors said showed the R&B singer engaging in sex acts with an underage girl.

In 2008, a jury in Chicago declared Kelly not guilty of producing child sexual abuse imagery after seeing the infamous video.

But on Thursday, the woman at the centre of the 2008 trial took the stand, saying she and Kelly had sex "hundreds" of times when she was underage, and explaining how two decades ago, he had persuaded her to deny their relationship to law enforcement officials.

"I was extremely scared that my parents would find out," she said, adding she was afraid of what would happen to Kelly.

Kelly, whose full name is Robert Sylvester Kelly, has been trailed by accusations of abusing young women and underage girls for more than two decades.

The 55-year-old artiste had long avoided criminal punishment until last year, when he was sentenced to 30 years in prison after he was convicted in federal court in New York of racketeering and sex trafficking charges.

The woman at the centre of the 2008 trial, now 37, took the stand at a courthouse in downtown Chicago, where she said she had been sexually abused repeatedly as a teenager by Kelly.

She testified that it was, in fact, her at age 14 appearing in the videotape, which at one point shows Kelly urinating on her.

Testifying under a pseudonym on Thursday, she told the court that in 2002, after law enforcement officials obtained the tape, Kelly sent her and her parents out of the United States to make them inaccessible to investigators.

The I Believe I Can Fly (1996) singer then urged her to deny to a grand jury that it was her on the tape and paid for a lawyer to accompany her, she said.

She testified she had falsely told the grand jury it was not her on the videotape and that she was not sexually involved with Kelly.

The tape surfaced after Mr Jim DeRogatis, a journalist at The Chicago SunTimes who had reported on the accusations against Kelly, received it in the mail from an anonymous sender and turned it over to law enforcement.

Kelly was charged in 2002 with producing child pornography, and he stood trial in 2008 but was acquitted. Prosecutors say they now have more evidence of the woman's abuse than the state prosecutors had 14 years ago.

The 2008 trial focused on one video, but the current trial centres on four videos that prosecutors say show Kelly sexually abusing the woman.

NYTIMES