Chicago singer R. Kelly has reportedly retained a former member of Bill Cosby’s legal team after Buzzfeed reported that he was keeping young women captive as part of a “sex cult.” Jezebel further corroborated the story, talking with an anonymous woman who claimed to be a part of R. Kelly’s entourage who shared bizarre details of the singer’s unusual living arrangements with the young women.
Despite other male celebrities jumping to his defense, Kelly obviously feels he may need a robust defense in court soon enough, and so the singer has retained the services of Monique Pressley, a Washington lawyer who represented Bill Cosby in his recent sexual assault trial. Pressley resigned from Cosby’s legal team in his sexual assault case last August after previously defending him on television, calling the allegations against him a “witch hunt,” and called it the responsibility of the accusers to report their assaults in a timely fashion.
For now, Pressley can best be described as being on retainer, as there is no currently open case or pending trial, and Kelly has denied the allegations against him. Police did check in on the young women, and quoted one of them in a report as saying she was “fine and did not want to be bothered with her parents because her father was threatening people.” Kelly had previously settled more than a dozen civil lawsuits out of court for pursuing romantic relationships with underage girls and secretly recording partners over the age of consent.
