After a day of futzing around Friday, the R. Kelly trial started for real today, with three jurors picked, the Chicago papers report. The case comes out of a sex tape Kelly made with himself and what prosecutors say was a girl of 13 or 14.

• The Sun-Times has a sweeping overview of Kelly’s career, done timeline fashion, here. It’s more than 5,000 words long.
• If you’re hankering for a little of that web multimedia, the Chicago Tribune has this three-slide presentation of the lead attorneys and the judge.
• From last week, a glimpse of Kelly’s midnight basketball games at a park in Chicago:

Though Kelly’s game is limited, an insider who has played against Kelly says the singer insists on playing point guard and “hogs the ball and shoots all the time.”

“His team wins every night or he gets upset,” the insider said.

As the trial continues, these are the story strands to follow:

One: The Chicago Sun-Times had a scoop last week: That a key witness in the case, a woman who reportedly will testify that she had a threesome with Kelly and the under-aged girl at the center of the trial, at one time possessed a tape of that sexual encounter as well.* She will testify that an aide to Kelly paid her to return the tape—and later had her take a polygraph test to supposedly ensure that she had not made a copy of it, the paper said.

That woman’s testimony was the subject of the several closed-door hearings Judge Vincent Gaughan held in the weeks before the trial. (The judge heard motions on protests by media outlets about those closed hearings, this week, and turned them down.) This issue will resonate throughout the trial because …

Two: …The prosecution is hampered by the fact that the girl on the tape with Kelly is said to have many times denied to police that it is she on the tape. Testimony from a friend to the contrary will obviously be important to prosecutors.

Three: As I’ve said before, rich folks in America, black or white, end to buy their way out of trouble like this; Kelly’s attorneys, with the help of a mysteriously befuddled Cook County prosecutors office, have already managed to delay his day of reckoning for six years. The defense team’s strategy has not yet revealed itself, but one assumes it will be something more sophisticated than “It wasn’t him and in any case she was over 18.” One assumes that because…

Four: The tape at the center of the case is supposed to be in focus and of high quality. Kelly is said to peer into the camera at the beginning of it as well. Prosecutors reportedly have many associates and relatives who have identified Kelly and the girl in the video. Indeed, the mystery of the six years’ delay is why the prosecutors could not just have made their case based on the photographic evidence they had in hand long ago, and let the chips fall where they may. Particularly because…

Five: …the tape is more than 20 minutes long, and described by all who have seen it as shocking. One would think that the grueling effect of its being played in open court may seal Kelly’s fate then and there. In one of the earliest lawsuits against Kelly from a young girl he is said to have had sex with, Kelly’s side stonewalled—until the girl gave what was said to be a devastating seven-hour deposition about the particulars of their relationship, after which Kelly’s side quickly settled. It’s possible Kelly’s lawyers have been pushing the star to cut a deal with prosecutors but that he has refused.

Six: And finally, how much evidence of past accusations—settled lawsuits, arrests, and so forth—Judge Vincent Gaughan allows the state to introduce as evidence.
The trial continues tomorrow.

*That brings to four the number of pieces of digital media said to feature Kelly and young girls in sex acts. 1) The tape at the center of the case; 2) A film of another sex encounter that accompanied the first, the other participant of which, said to be a young girl, has never been identified; 3) A number of sexually explicit digital photos featuring a young girl found in a house Kelly owned in Florida, which were eventually disallowed as evidence; 4) and then this encounter, said to involve Kelly and two women, at least one of which is said to have been under-aged.