The judge’s ruling in the R. Kelly case that reporter Jim DeRogatis must testify creates problems for him, his paper, and the prosecution in several ways. For those just coming to the story, DeRogatis was delivered, anonymously, the 27-minute sex tape that is at the center of pop superstar R. Kelly’s current trial. The paper turned the tape over to police.

DeRogatis, who works for the Chicago Sun-Times, first wrote about R. Kelly’s legal problems a year before the tape came to light. Without his adventuresome reporting, the tape might not have come to notice and an alleged child molester like Kelly wouldn’t be on trial right now.

Kelly’s defense wants to get the writer on the stand for a couple of reasons. The one with a remote legal justification involves what exactly happened to a key piece of evidence. The others are dicier:

The defense also says it wants to establish whether DeRogatis bore a grudge against Kelly; whom he showed the tape to; and if he made a copy.

(Hitsville is an old friend of DeRogatis and used to host a talk-show with him; while we’ve talked in recent weeks I’ve avoided asking him these questions and I don’t know the answers myself, save for the grudge issue, which strikes me as specious.)

The R. Kelly tape, showing, as it is alleged to, child pornography, is legally radioactive. Being questioned puts the reporter in a difficult position. Was watching the tape a crime? Was showing it to someone else a crime? If he did copy it, was copying it a crime? At what time did he know/suspect/decide that an under-age girl was involved? Since he’d written about Kelly’s issues in this area before, didn’t he suspect from the outset an under-aged girl was involved?

I wouldn’t want to answer any of those questions.

There’s of course the central irony, as well, that he would be being questioned by a lawyer for the guy who, nearly a dozen witnesses have testified, made the thing. Hitsville still doesn’t understand the logic of the defense’s position.

It leaves DeRogatis and the paper with uncomfortable choices. He could be made legally liable for doing his job. (Irony would not be the word for a situation in which the reporter suffers some legal penalty and Kelly gets off.) Once on the stand, the judge could allow the defense to ask all sorts of questions about his reporting and reporting methods. Taking the Fifth Amendment would be inappropriate for a reporter.

The least unappealing option would be, uh, appealing, which the paper is doing. I have no inside knowledge on this at all, but let’s not forget that the Sun-Times is not the New York Times. It’s a struggling newspaper—it’s the number two paper, remember, in Chicago, after the Tribune. It’s been abused by Murdoch and looted by Conrad Black and doesn’t have unlimited financial resources. One assumes that, given the paper’s strong journalistic history, there is the internal corporate fortitude to defend DeRogatis, but that of course has yet to be seen.

Finally, this is exhibit number one for the R. Kelly CircusWatch™; the defense is doing anything it can to distract attention from the trial’s testimony thus far, which has essentially been a parade of people saying “Yes, that’s him,” “Yes, that’s her,” and “Yes, that’s his house.”