R. Kelly gets 30 years sentence over sex trafficking

R&B singer R. Kelly was sentenced to 30 years in prison on Wednesday for recruiting  teenagers and women for sex.

The Judge,  Ann Donnelly handed down the term in the Brooklyn federal court nearly a year after the 55-year-old Kelly was convicted by a New York jury.

“The verdict is in: R. Kelly has been sentenced to 30 years,”the US attorney’s office for the Eastern District of New York said in a tweet.

The prosecutors had urged the court to put the artist behind bars for at least 25 years, saying he still “poses a serious danger to the public.”

Recall the ex-superstar was found guilty in September on all nine charges he faced.

“His actions were brazen, manipulative, controlling, and coercive. He has shown no remorse or respect for the law,” prosecutors wrote in their sentencing memo.

Kelly’s lawyers called for a lighter sentence with a maximum of approximately 17 years.

The sentence is coming a month before jury selection is due to start in Kelly’s separate, long-delayed federal trial in Chicago on August 15.

In that case, Kelly and two of his former associates are alleged to have rigged the singer’s 2008 pornography trial and hid years of sexual abuse of minors.

The musician who once dominated R&B also faces prosecution in two other state jurisdictions.

 #MeToo Milestone

Kelly’s conviction in New York was widely seen as a milestone for the #MeToo movement: It was the first major sex abuse trial where the majority of accusers were Black women.

It was also the first time Kelly faced criminal consequences for the abuse he for decades was rumored to have inflicted on women and children.

Prosecutors were tasked with proving Kelly guilty of racketeering, a federal charge commonly associated with organized crime syndicates that depicted Kelly as the boss of an enterprise of associates who facilitated his abuse.

Calling 45 witnesses including 11 alleged victims to the stand, they painstakingly presented a pattern of crimes they say the artist born Robert Sylvester Kelly carried out for years with impunity, capitalizing on his fame to prey on the less powerful.

These testimonies intended to prove those acts include accusations of rape, drugs, imprisonment and child pornography.

His accusers described events that often mirrored one another: Many of the alleged victims said they had met the singer at concerts or mall performances and were then handed slips of paper with Kelly’s contact details by members of his entourage.

Several said they were told he could bolster their music industry aspirations. Core to the state’s case was Kelly’s relationship with the late singer Aaliyah.

Kelly wrote and produced her first album — “Age Ain’t Nothin’ But A Number” — before illegally marrying her when she was just 15 because he feared he had impregnated her.