CHICAGO (Globe Live Media) — A former marketing agent for R. Kelly testified Tuesday that the singer offered him $1 million to find a VHS tape featuring Kelly as prosecutors tried to persuade a jury that Kelly was desperate to retrieve the missing recording, knowing that could catch him. in legal danger if he fell into the hands of law enforcement.
Based in part on that recording, which prosecutors say shows the R&B star sexually abusing a 14-year-old girl, Kelly faces charges including production of child pornography. He is also accused of rigging his 2008 state child pornography trial by threatening witnesses and trying to hide video evidence.
Charles Freeman testified Tuesday that Kelly approached him in 2001 asking him to find the recording. Freeman, a 52-year-old man from Kansas City, also explained how he pressured Kelly and her associates for years to pay him the full million dollars after Freeman found and returned the tape.
Freeman told jurors he didn’t know the content of the video until he retrieved it from an Atlanta home in 2001 and then put it on a VHS player at a friend’s house later that day.
“I observed Robert Kelly having sex with a young woman,” he said.
When a prosecutor asked Freeman, who testified Tuesday under an immunity agreement, why it took him nearly two decades to turn over that and other child phonograph recordings linked to Kelly to police, Freeman replied: “Because the police weren’t going to pay me a million dollars.
Kelly, 55, is already serving 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. If he is convicted in Chicago, he could see years added to that sentence.
At his 2008 trial, in which Kelly was ultimately acquitted, state prosecutors described Kelly dragging a duffel bag full of his homemade child pornography tapes everywhere. Despite Kelly’s efforts in the 1990s to keep them close, some leaked or were stolen by disaffected workers or friends, prosecutors said.
After Kelly was acquitted in 2008, some jurors told reporters they had no choice but to find Kelly not guilty because the girl, then in her 20s, did not take the stand to confirm that she was the one appearing. in the video. Last week, she testified at the federal trial in Chicago, saying she was the minor in the video and Kelly was the adult male.
But coming up with the million dollars Freeman said Kelly promised him turned out to be an exhausting task that took years, he told the jury.
Shortly after Freeman found the video, he met with two of Kelly’s associates in 2001 at a Kansas City hotel hoping to receive full payment, Freeman testified. When he walked into a room and saw two brown bags filled with cash, he told the jury he knew right away it wasn’t enough.
“That’s not a million dollars,” he recalled telling Kelly’s people.
Freeman said he ended up walking away with a paper bag full of $75,000 in cash after being assured he would eventually get the full $1 million. Even after turning in the tape and receiving partial payment, Freeman maintained enormous influence over Kelly, including the possibility that she might go public with what she knew.
Freeman described himself harassing Kelly at concerts to demand that she pay the million-dollar balance, threatening to go public with what he knew, and filing lawsuits to force Kelly to pay. He said each threat and demand generally led to Kelly’s associates throwing more money at Freeman, sometimes literally.
On another occasion, at R. Kelly’s home in suburban Chicago, Freeman said that an associate of Kelly’s and now a co-defendant in the ongoing trial, Derrel McDavid, told Freeman to take off all his clothes and get into a room. Kelly’s pool to make sure Freeman wasn’t using a recording device for law enforcement.
“I’m not going to get in any pool naked,” Freeman recalled telling McDavid. Freeman said he eventually took off his shirt to show that he wasn’t wearing a wire.
Later, while pulling out of a parking lot, McDavid gave Freeman another installment, throwing a brown bag containing $100,000 in ten $10,000 packages through the open window of Freeman’s car.
McDavid and another Kelly associate, Milton Brown, are on trial with Kelly. McDavid is accused of helping Kelly fix the 2008 trial, while Brown is accused of receiving child pornography. Like Kelly, they have also denied any wrongdoing.
Freeman testified that in late 2003 or early 2004, he was approached again by McDavid to retrieve another tape that had disappeared from Kelly’s collection. He said he told McDavid, “If I have to get another tape back, you have to pay me another million dollars.”
Freeman is expected to take the stand again on Wednesday, when defense attorneys will have a chance to question him.