This website uses cookies so that we can provide you with the best user experience possible. Cookie information is stored in your browser and performs functions such as recognising you when you return to our website and helping our team to understand which sections of the website you find most interesting and useful.
Artist News Legal
Prosecutors cite R Kelly’s marriage to Aaliyah as a reason to continue to deny bail
By Andy Malt | Published on Tuesday 3 September 2019
Prosecutors leading the criminal action against R Kelly in Chicago have brought up the musician’s 1994 marriage to fellow music star Aaliyah as a reason why he should continue to be held in custody without bail as he fights an assortment of sexual abuse charges.
The new legal filing aims to counter ongoing efforts by Kelly’s legal team to secure bail for their client as he awaits trials in both Chicago and New York. He has been held in custody since his arrest in July.
Although the papers do not specifically name Aaliyah, they use the marriage to highlight Kelly’s alleged “intentional and prolific” abuse of underage girls. Because, of course, although the criminal charges are new, Kelly has faced allegations of routine abuse against women, including young teenagers, for years.
According to Page Six, in a plea to the judge overseeing the case, prosecutors state: “[Kelly] even married a fifteen year old girl when he was 27 years old. The government produced in discovery to the defendant the official marriage application, marriage certificate, and annulment records for this marriage. Far from being a one-time mistake, defendant’s sexual abuse of minors was intentional and prolific”.
Kelly and Aaliyah married in secret in 1994, putting her age as eighteen on the marriage certificate, although she was actually only fifteen. The pair had begun a relationship after he produced her debut album, ‘Age Ain’t Nothing But A Number’, which was released in 1994.
The marriage was annulled by her parents six months later. Kelly has previously denied that they were married or that they were even in a relationship. Asked for comment on the latest filing by prosecutors, Kelly’s attorney Steve Greenberg said that the marriage was “ancient” and “irrelevant” to the current criminal cases.
The musician’s legal team is expected to again request that he be granted bail at a hearing later this week. Last week, they filed to have him removed from solitary confinement – prosecutors countering that he isn’t in solitary confinement because he has a cellmate.
