R Kelly loses appeal, 20-year prison term for child abuse upheld

The disgraced singer tried to argue that Illinois's shorter statute of limitations applied to his case.

R Kelly was correctly sentenced to 20 years in prison on child sexual abuse convictions in Chicago, a federal appeals court ruled on Friday.

The Grammy award-winning R&B singer, born Robert Sylvester Kelly, was convicted in 2022 on three charges of producing child abuse images and three charges of enticing minors.

Kelly argued in his appeal that Illinois’s former, shorter statute of limitations on child abuse crime prosecutions should have applied to his Chicago case rather than the current law allowing charges while an accuser is still alive.

He also contended that charges involving one accuser should have been tried separately from the charges tied to three other accusers due to video evidence that became a focal point of the Chicago trial.

The accuser, identified only as Jane, testified for the first time that she was 14 when the video was taken.

The three-judge panel from the Chicago-based Seventh US Circuit Court of Appeals noted in Friday’s ruling that jurors acquitted Kelly on seven of the 13 counts against him "even after viewing those abhorrent tapes".

Despite Kelly’s appeals, Judge Harry Leinenweber ordered him to serve the 20 years from the Chicago case concurrently with the New York sentence. 

Kelly has separately appealed the New York sentence.