At the R. Kelly trial today, a police inspector is testifying that it is a room in Kelly’s house that appears in the child-sex video that is the center of the case.

There’s been no word on the defense motion to subpoena Sun-Times reporter Jim DeRogatis, who was anonymously delivered the tape in 2002. The judge gave the paper a week to respond.

Yesterday, during which the court was not in session because of the holiday, the Sun-Times reported that a certain controversial witness will take the stand tomorrow, Wednesday.

This is the woman whose potential testimony caused a week or so of closed-door hearings before the trial opened.

According to the paper, the witness is a woman who will testify that she personally had group sex with Kelly and the girl who is allegedly on the sex tape. Again according to the paper, she will also testify that she personally owned a different videotape of the three of them in the act, which Kelly’s associates pressured her to destroy—and then made her take a polygraph test to put to rest their suspicions that she made a copy.

Hitsville doesn’t follow the legal world of child-sex-tape prosecutions closely, but he suspects this is a first.

It’s hard to keep an exact count, but as far as I can tell eight separate people have thus far identified either Kelly or a local Chicago girl or both as being in the video. According to local reporting on the case, the girl has denied to police that it is she; accounts conflict as to whether she will testify.

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In case you missed it, the trial concluded its first week with arguments from the defense that some of the government witnesses who have testified about possessing the tape in question be charged with possession of child pornography. The defense’s contentions thus far are: A) It’s not Kelly on the tape and B) It’s not the girl in question on the tape but it is C) Child pornography and anyone who has seen it should be charged except D) R. Kelly, who is not on the tape.

Kelly has the money to buy whatever legal representation he needs to get himself out of the fix he’s in; if you’re considering the odds on the case, you have to wager on the side of the rich guy. Once he gets off, however, given the concern expressed about this issue by his lawyer, we can look forward to an OJ-style anouncement from Kelly, that he won’t rest until he finds the brutes who not only filmed child porn in his basement rec room, but also enlisted some special young friends of Kelly’s to participate.

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As Hitsville noted before in regard to the witness who is supposed to take the stand on Wednesday, her testimony will bring to four the number of instances of alleged filmed evidence of Kelly having sex with under-aged girls. (There are approximately a dozen alleged instances of his having sex with girls total; there are just the filmed ones. I’m sorry—allegedly filmed ones.)

The first is the video that resulted in the 14 child-porn charges against Kelly. The second is another filmed sex act with what people who have seen it say was another girl, who has never been identified, which was circulated on street corners as part of the original Kelly sex tape.* The third are the images on a digital camera police confiscated from Kelly’s home in Florida, but which were later ruled inadmissible in court by a judge. The new threesome tape which will reportedly be the focus of the testimony tomorrow is the fourth.

* It would be nice if one of the folks covering the trial tried to find out what happened to that tape. Did the state ever try to introduce it as evidence?