R. Kelly is in the midst of a legal saga that has been a long time coming, and now there is a new development. According to court documents obtained by The Blast, the singer is being accused of sending letters that threaten his alleged victims.
Kelly is trying to be released on bond at the moment, and prosecutors refuted Kelly’s claim that he poses no threat by asserting that he has a history of trying to silence alleged victims. The documents say that Kelly “sent a typewritten letter to a lawyer then representing Jane Doe #5, threatening to release compromising and potentially embarrassing photographs of Jane Doe #5 if she pursued her civil lawsuit against the defendant.”
Kelly supposedly obtained the “compromising” and “embarrassing” photographs by “coercing women to write letters containing false and embarrassing allegations, so that the defendant could use those letters as blackmail.” The documents continue, “Multiple witnesses have reported that the defendant directed them to write these embarrassing and false letters and the similarities among the accounts by multiple witnesses lends credence to their accounts.”
Furthermore, the prosecution says witnesses claim Kelly “issued veiled threats designed to prevent witnesses from testifying against him. Specifically, with respect to multiple women, he directed the women, prospective witnesses against him, to pick a side, and strongly implied that choosing the wrong side — i.e., not his side — would result in harm to them or their families.”
Prosecutors also noted, “The defendant cannot credibly deny his role in intimidating witnesses by claiming, self-servingly, that he could not have written the letter due to his allegedly limited reading and writing skills where he provided the material used to make the threats and signed his name to the accompanying documents.”
Earlier this year, Kelly’s attorneys claimed that Kelly “suffers from a learning disability that adversely affects his ability to read […] in essence he cannot.”
