R. Kelly gets another year in prison after sex abuse conviction in Chicago

R. Kelly is set to serve more time in prison after being convicted in his second federal trial.

A judge sentenced the disgraced R&B singer to 20 years in prison on Thursday after a Chicago jury found him guilty of sex crimes last year. But the judge also ruled that Kelly can serve nearly that entire sentence concurrently with his prior 30-year sentence, meaning he is only getting an additional year behind bars on top of that.

Kelly was convicted in September 2022 in Chicago on three counts of child pornography and three counts of enticement. This came after a trial in which four women who accused Kelly of sexual abuse testified, including one who said she was abused by the singer on camera when she was 14. This tape was central to Kelly's prior 2008 trial, which ended in his acquittal on child pornography charges. The woman did not testify in the earlier trial.

The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

A Brooklyn jury previously convicted Kelly on racketeering and sex trafficking charges in 2021, and he was sentenced to 30 years in prison, which he is now serving. Prosecutors had wanted Kelly to serve 25 additional years after the Chicago conviction, arguing that "the only way to ensure Kelly does not reoffend is to impose a sentence that will keep him in prison for the rest of his life."

But Kelly's lawyer, Jennifer Bonjean, said in a court filing that even just with the 30-year sentence, the 56-year-old would "have to defy all statistical odds to make it out of prison alive."