Essence magazine has a very long conversation with Lisa Van Allen, who you will recall was the woman who testified she had had a number of threesomes with Kelly and the allegedly under-age girl police said was on the sex tape at the center of the case. Lots of very poignant stuff here. Like this:

Essence.com: So how did you go from being an extra [at a video shoot in Atlanta] to meeting him personally?

Van Allen: He sent his cousin over to me. This guy told me his cousin wanted to talk to me. I asked him who his cousin was, and he said, “R. Kelly.” I said, “Okay,” and he arranged for me to be taken back to his trailer. In between the scenes, he came back to the trailer and talked to me. I was very flattered. Out of all the girls at the video shoot, he picked me out of everybody to talk to. We ended up having intercourse.

Essence.com: You had sex with him in the trailer that same day?

Van Allen: Yes. He started with a kiss, and from there we leaned back, and I just didn’t stop him. I was kind of worried that he wouldn’t want to see me again after that, but I wasn’t worried about the actual act at that time because I was just honored that he picked me. Being a young girl, I was like, “Wow.” I wasn’t thinking as a woman would.

And this:

Essence.com: Is it true that you got pregnant by R. Kelly and had an abortion?

Van Allen: Yes. I had the abortion in 2000, right before the “I Wish” video shoot. I was the one braiding his hair in that video. When I told him I was pregnant, he asked me what did I want to do, and I told him I wanted to get an abortion.

(The story includes a denial from one of Kelly’s lawyers. Another of his young girlfriends has said she got an abortion after an alliance with him; this woman was under-age at the time.)

And this:

Essence.com: In retrospect, do you feel that your relationship with him was damaging to you?

Van Allen: Yeah. As you can see, it still bothers me when I think about what went on. It’s emotionally stressful just knowing how I felt, how vulnerable I was. How I wanted him to love me and accept me. I didn’t want to get him mad at me. And I didn’t know what real love was. He was the first man I had ever dealt with—I was 17 when I met him, I hadn’t dealt with men before. I really didn’t know what I was getting myself into.

Essence.com: If these allegations are true, some people have suggested that you are just as reprehensible as R. Kelly is—that you also were having sex with an underage girl. What is your response to that?

Van Allen: I didn’t know that she was 14. He left me in the dark just like everybody else was in the dark. People hear that I’m 27, and they think that I was an adult when it happened. They don’t realize that I was coming in to being a young woman. I didn’t know her real age. I didn’t know the truth.

Essence.com: Why do you think nobody else in R. Kelly’s circle has come forward about him and teenage girls?

Van Allen: Because they don’t want people to look at them in the wrong light, like how they’ve done me. You see how this case went. It was supposed to be about him, but when I came out, they just switched it all over to me.

Essence.com: The allegations and the video haven’t put a dent in R. Kelly’s career. He still has droves of devoted fans, and his albums still top the charts. Why do you think so few people seem to care about this issue?

Van Allen: It’s like no one wants to step up and take responsibility for what’s happening. I have no idea why more people don’t want to get involved and put themselves out there for our children. I guess if it was closer to home, maybe they would. If it was their child or their sister. But it shouldn’t be that way.

The first page of the interview is here.

The second page, the link to which is a little hard to find, is here.

Hitsville was so grossed out by the R. Kelly case (not the verdict, but just writing about the particulars of Kelly’s predilictions) that he didn’t have the stomach to immediately start writing about how repulsive the Roman Polanski documentary on HBO was. (It was first shown a couple of weeks ago, and remains in heavy rotation.)

My interest in the Kelly case came about not because he’s a serial sexual predator who should be put behind bars, but because the press had become so complicit in the celebrity hype machine that the crimes he was accused of had become not even worth mentioning to virtually everyone who wrote about his albums or tours.

It had something to do with a lot of journalists being lazy, but it also had something to do with the Ick Factor.

You’re a pop critic at a podunk paper, and R. Kelly’s coming to town. No one at your paper wants to hear about a child-porn sex tape, much less one that involves the words “urinating” and “on a girl police say is 13 or 14.” It is a firmly held belief of newspaper editors that people don’t want to read about gross stuff over their Rice Krispies. So why not just do the usual fun puff piece promoting the Kelly show, and refer obliquely to some unspecified “legal problems”? It’s a win-win situation.

… Unless you’re the parents of  a teenage girl who goes to the Kelly show, catches the eye of one of Kelly’s henchmen, and gets invited backstage.

But whatever. I feel like I should mention the Polanski case, even though it gets into depressingly similar vomitous territory, because no one else did.

We all know that story: The girl with the stardom-obsessed mother who left her daughter alone with the hedonistic European director so he could do a late-night Vogue photo shoot with her in Jack Nicholson’s mansion. What could possibly have gone wrong?

Nature took its course. Polanski was duly arrested and charged, apparently to his great surprise. (Americains puritains!) Negotitations began for a plea bargain but, as the new HBO documentary demonstrates, Polanski ultimately decided he was about to be the victim of railroaded American justice. You can argue that his fears were well-grounded, as the documentary does, but it’s also true that taking a plane out of LAX and living in luxury in France for the next three decades is an option not generally open to criminals who harbor similar suspicions.

The documentary spends a great deal of time obsessing about Polanski’s endangered legal rights and some amusing footnotes to the case, right down to noting that the judge in the case had a girlfriend or two.

The judge was apparently unmarried, so it’s not clear how this was relevant. (It would actually be irrelevant if he had been married, come to think of it.) Anyway, engrossed in such trivia, the filmmakers nelect to explain properly what Polanski was accused of. He did, as the documentary details, photograph the aspiring young Vogue model naked in a hot tub and then, over her repeated objections, whisk her off to a bedroom for sex.

The fact that he had dosed her with a Quaalude made this all easier. “I was having trouble with coordination like walking and stuff,” the girl later said.

But while the movie mentions the (ambiguous) word sodomy in passing (as only some of the recent coverage of the documentary does) it never explains what that charge stemmed from.

I only know about it because the Smoking Gun web site has posted the original grand jury testimony of the girl. It went something like this:

“Then he lifted up my legs and went in through my anus.”

“What do you mean by that?:

“He put his penis in my butt.”

Polanski was 44 at the time. His difficult life as a Jewish survivor of World War II is mentioned many times in the film, but the fact that the drugged little girl was anally raped isn’t mentioned at all.

Polanski is being protected by the filmmakers, who are unaccountably more entranced with his celebrity than they are with sharing with their audience the salient facts of the case, which makes them both incompetent and unethical.

But Polanski, like Kelly, is also protected by something else: The Ick Factor.

Family activists complain, with some justification, that we live in a coarse world. It’s hard to do anything about it, because the coarseness seems to be what an ever-more-empowered audience demands.

In this context, it’s surprising that men like Polanski and Kelly are able to find themselves charged with deeds that test even today’s broad palette of commonly discussed sexuality. (Entertainers aren’t the only ones, incidentally. There is a certain footnote to the Starr Report, containing words uniquely used there in relation to the Presidency of the United States, that as far as I can ascertain were never repeated in the news pages amid the reams of commentary that that scandal generated.)

But it seems plain that if those charges were repeated as often as we are told of, say, their Grammy and Oscar wins, their diverting music videos or their continental flair, our perception of the men, and their cases, would be somewhat different. In this sense, the true beneficiaries of the Ick Factor are plain.

The Chicago Tribune takes a look back and decides the verdict came from what everyone’s been saying all week: The prosecution didn’t have a victim:

One paramount lesson to take away from the failed child pornography prosecution of R&B star R. Kelly is this: It’s hard to win a conviction when the alleged victim not only denies it but also doesn’t show up in court.

“Child exploitation cases are usually difficult to defend,” said Paul DerOhannesian, a New York lawyer who is an expert on criminal cases involving the sexual assault of children. “But the lack of a [complaining] victim here was a major weakness that drained the case of emotion.”

There’s another thread here as well:

[…] Kelly’s gold-plated defense team had the resources and skill to put off the trial for years, and legal analysts say that delay may have sapped the potential to provoke juror outrage.

“Time was his friend,” said Andrea Zopp, the former Cook County prosecutor….

It was thought, in the Tribune as elsewhere, that the extraordinary six-year delay in the case was due to the trouble the state had in coming up with something to base the case on, absent the girl they thought was on the tape, who as the story said not only wouldn’t testify, but told police and a grand jury that it wasn’t she.*

It seems that in the end the state’s strategy was to base the case on the production of child porn, rather than statutory rape, which in a way took the victim out of it. You have to give Cook County credit: The case ultimately included a friend of both Kelly’s and the girl’s who could testify to having had three-way sex with the pair—and having been filmed doing it. But that gambit, obviously, didn’t work.

Meanwhile, the Sun-Times goes back to canvas the reactions of some of the witnesses at the trial—particularly those who were friends of the girl in question and ID’ed her in court:

Tjada Burnett, a family friend of the alleged victim who also testified against Kelly, said she “can’t understand” the verdict.

Burnett said she had spoken Friday night with Sparkle, the alleged victim’s aunt who introduced her to Kelly when she was just 12.

Sparkle “was very, very upset,” Burnett said.

Bennie Edwards Sr., the alleged victim’s uncle, who also testified for the state, described Kelly’s acquittal as “B.S.”

“How can the jury let a pedophile go like that?” he asked.

Though he too is estranged from his niece, he said: “She’s gotta be hurting right now.”

Kelly, he predicted, will “get what he’s got coming.”

————-

* Based on the testimony of other people at the trial, the chances are good that the woman was lying to the police and perjuring herself before the grand jury, and that the three relatives of hers who testified at the trial committed perjury as well.

Something I just noticed while looking something up in the original Sun-Times stories about Kelly’s predilections, emphasis added:

The girl in the video, now 17, was identified by her aunt, who said that her niece would have been 14 at the time the tape was made, based on her appearance. Kelly can also be heard on the tape referring to the girl by her first name.

————

Previously in Hitsville:

The verdict: Jim DeRogatis’s take
Post-morteming the R. Kelly case
Who you gonna believe: Your own eyes or R. Kelly’s defense team?

The world’s weirdest defense summation

Everything you need to know about the R. Kelly case

R. Kelly Sexfacts™ IV: The Quantum of Solace! The complete prosecution case!

The Godfather Who Shagged Me: The complete R. Kelly SexFacts™, Parts I, II & III—Every barfy thing you ever wanted to know about the origins of the R. Kelly case

Targeting Jim DeRogatis—literally

More on L’affaire DeRogatis

The DeRogatis ruling

Bad craziness at the R. Kelly trial?

At the R. Kelly trial, they do things they don’t do on Broadway!

Ever hear the one about the guy convicted of murdering his parents who asked for mercy because he was a orphan?

The NYT and R. Kelly: Curiouser and curiouser

The NYT finally notices R. Kelly isn’t a nice guy

R. Kelly and the NYT: The Freaky Defense

Tribune, Sun-Times protest closed hearings in R. Kelly case

Secret hearings in the R. Kelly case

R. Kelly’s Publicist: He slept with my daughter!

The Chicago Sun-Times reporter, whose reporting kicked off the R. Kelly scandals nearly eight years ago, gives his impression in the paper:

The 41-year-old artist proudly described himself as “the World’s Greatest,” a “Sexual Super Freak” and “the Pied Piper of R&B”—perhaps oblivious to the fact that the Pied Piper of medieval legend led 130 boys and girls from a German village to their doom. Yet despite his acquittal Friday on 14 counts of making child pornography, it remains difficult to dismiss his lyrics and his boasting in the media as mere hyperbole.The prosecution chose to pursue a very narrow case against the superstar, solely concentrating on a 26-minute, 39-second tape anonymously sent to the Chicago Sun-Times in February 2002. But as the paper first reported in December 2000, for more than a decade, public records and lawsuits allege that Kelly abused his staggering wealth and fame to pursue sexual relationships with underage girls, many of whom were left deeply wounded by those encounters.

The voices of those girls were never heard in Judge Vincent Gaughan’s courtroom. But they include:

• The late Aaliyah D. Haughton, Kelly’s celebrated 15-year-old protege, whom he illegally married in 1994 shortly after producing the debut album he titled “Age Ain’t Nothing But a Number.” (The marriage was annulled, and Kelly paid Aaliyah a token sum in a settlement.)

• Tiffany H[.]*, who sued Kelly claiming that he began having sex with her when she was 15 after he picked her while visiting her choir class at his alma mater, Kenwood Academy. (Kelly settled the lawsuit for an undisclosed sum.)

• Tracy S[.], a former intern at Epic Records who sued Kelly claiming that she lost her virginity to him at age 17. (Kelly settled the lawsuit for an undisclosed sum.)

• Patrice J[.], a Chicago woman who sued Kelly alleging that they began having sex after he met her at the Rock ‘n’ Roll McDonald’s following her high school’s senior prom. (Kelly settled the lawsuit for an undisclosed sum.)

• And Montina W[.], a legal-age dancer who sued Kelly claiming that he videotaped her without her knowledge while they were having sex. (Kelly settled the lawsuit for an undisclosed sum.)

And these are just the main on-the-record, names-attached cases we know about. (There is photographic evidence of two more, but the girls in them have never been identified.)

DeRogatis’s piece is a reminder of the second-saddest thing about the verdict. (The first is that Kelly’s back on the streets a smarter and wiser sexual predator, presumably with the minor object lesson learned that he merely probably shouldn’t film himself urinating on under-aged girls.)

The second saddest is that he’s now an acquitted sexual predator and will be referred to that way by a press that has already spent nearly eight years downplaying the acts he’s been accused of. A year before the tape came to light DeRogatis and his reporting partner, Abdon Pallasch, had crafted a convincing portrait of Kelly’s activities in that realm.

The acts in that story will now fade as Kelly takes a what will certainly be a victory lap of media interviews, no doubt with pliable folks who won’t press Kelly for explanations.

————-

* Hitsville sees no reason to print the women’s full names.

Josh Levin, who spent two weeks over the trial for Slate, offers his thoughts here:

[…I]n the end, [prosecutors] were undone by what they didn’t have. Even without a cooperative victim, the state’s attorneys might have swayed the jury if Judge Vincent Gaughan had allowed them to present evidence of Kelly’s past transgressions, like the four known settlements he’s paid to underage girls who’ve accused him of sexual misconduct. Once you know all of that stuff, it’s somewhat hard to imagine that R. Kelly didn’t tape himself having sex with an underage girl. If, like the jury, you don’t know the singer’s history, there’s a lot more room for doubt.

The Sun-Times, in its latest update on the acquittal, has a new take on the verdict:

In a dramatic verdict that appeared to stun even his own highly-paid lawyers, the 41-year-old R&B star was cleared of all 14 counts of child pornography.

“Thank you Jesus, thank you Jesus, thank you Jesus,” Kelly whispered as each not guilty verdict was read.

[…]The relatively short deliberations after four weeks of testimony led many to believe Kelly would be convicted. Moments before the verdict was announced, the star’s downcast attorney Sam Adam Jr. turned to Kelly, shaking his hand and somberly telling him, “We did everything we could.”

But an overcome Kelly dropped his head and began sobbing as the first “not guilty” was read shortly after 2 p.m. Friday, keeping it bowed for several minutes as he was cleared on each of the remaining counts.

Sitting next to him, Adam exclaimed “Yes!,” dropping his jaw in shock and hugging Kelly, who dabbed the tears streaming down his face with a baby blue handkerchief.

From the Chicago Tribune:

“All of us felt the grayness of the case,” said one white male juror.Most thought it was probably R. Kelly in the video, said one 54-year-old male black juror. Many thought the girl in the video was underage. But there remained a doubt that she was the victim alleged by prosecutors, the juror said.

The jury spent time looking at facial profiles, still shots and comparing them to the alleged victim’s face. And the young woman’s silence all but ruled out a guilty verdict, the juror said.

“The victim didn’t show up,” he said. “Her parents didn’t. The family that did was split.”

From the Sun-Times:

The jurors, who deliberated for about three hours Thursday and part of today before reaching their verdict, said the closest they came to finding Kelly guilty was a seven to five vote to acquit before a final 12-0 tally.

Jurors who spoke to the media at the Cook County courthouse at 26th and California after today’s verdict said that no juror caved just because they were tired of being sequestered and wanted to go home.

“All of us wanted to go home, but we knew — like the judge said the first day — we had to do our duty,” said one female juror, who declined to be identified by name.

One juror who initially voted to convict R. Kelly said he was convinced the man seen on a sex tape, which prosecutors said was Kelly with his underage goddaughter, was indeed Kelly. But after discussions about the defense arguments that prosecutors had not proven the girl’s identity, the juror decided that prosecutors had not proven Kelly’s guilt in the child porn case beyond a reasonable doubt.

Reporters told the jurors some details the jurors were not allowed to hear in court — that Kelly had married aspiring actress Aaliyah Haughton when she was 15 years old; that three girls had filed lawsuits against him claiming he lured them into sexual relationships when they were underage; and that other girls had threatened similar suits but settled out of court.

Asked by reporters if that evidence would have changed their minds, one male juror said “I would have had to work harder [to vote for acquittal].’’

Added a female juror, “If they had presented it, who knows what we would have done.’’

I’ve noted before how the Tribune’s handling of its R. Kelly coverage is pretty lame:

Incidentally, the Tribune’s odd handling of its R. Kelly stories continues. Where the Sun-Times has always had an R. Kelly main page on the web on which you could access all of the paper’s voluminous R. Kelly coverage, the Tribune’s promotion of this valuable archive online has been spotty. (Valuable to the paper I mean; it’s the logical place for folks around the world to find comprehensive coverage of the trial.) You need to find an actual R. Kelly story, and then try to navigate the (non-chronological) list of stories to the left to get up to speed. If there’s a home page for the paper’s Kelly coverage I’ve never been able to find it.

Now, it seems, some of the early stories in the case have disappeared, apparently because the Trib removes two-week-old stories and sticks them in a (for pay) archive. The Trib had an early deal with AOL and I’ve always thought it was an operation with sophisticated web folks around.

Is it possible, in 2008, that the paper’s web people don’t notice stories drawing increased attention and get to work maximizing the interest? What kind of numbskulls start taking down their on-the-scene coverage of a local story of international interest? Sam Zell know about this?

Now, check out this screen shot of the paper’s acquittal story. (It encompasses the entire screen on my laptop; I had to lower the type size just to get a shot that included story text.) In its desperation to monetize, the paper’s web site fills the window with Google ads. The subject of most of them are funny, but besides that it’s not really a very reader-friendly way of doing things:

Since the jury deliberated less than a full day it’s plain the prosecution couldn’t make its case. And as Hitsville said all along, you can’t go wrong betting that the rich guy gets off.

Still, from reading the local accounts of the defense’s case—and particularly its closing arguments, in which the main Kelly attorney thundered to the jury that convicting Kelly would be calling the poor girl in the video “a whore”—you had the overwhelming sense of a Keystone Kops operation.

This impression turned out not be accurate.

(Story links as they come up will be posted below. In the meantime, I’ll keep adding to analysis.)

The most devastating thing about the verdict seems to have been its quickness. Assuming that there was method to the Kelly defense’s madness, it seems as though they were not pursuing a hung jury, and appealing to the one or two craziest people empaneled. Rather, it seems to have been the equivalent of a “fifty state strategy,” and running the table by attacking every bit of the prosecution’s case.

Indeed, the Trib is now reporting that the initial juror vote was lopsided:

The initial vote after the case went to the jury was 10-2 in favor of acquittal. Subsequent votes during “heated but civil” deliberations moved back and forth, but never very far. A white female juror said the jurors shared opinions, but never saw anything conclusive.

“And at some point we said there was a lack of evidence,” the woman said. “There was nothing concrete enough to say it was him or her on that tape.”

From the outside, it all seemed preposterous. But, in the end, inside the jury room, we have to assume, there was simply not a significant core of people arguing that Kelly was guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.

From the coverage available to most of us, it seems the most likely weak link was the age of the girl; it could be the jury accepted that the man was Kelly but that doubt existed about the girl, particularly since the defense produced three people that swore it wasn’t she.

Kelly now is free to go back to his old lifestyle, barring Cook County’s finding the girl who was on one of the other Kelly sex tapes floating around who hasn’t been identified yet. As Hitsville has noted before, there have been reports of at least five bits of film floating around that purportedly show Kelly and various young girls having sex.

The piquant reaction USA Today found from the “entertainment director” of Essence magazine Kelly’s prosecution is just another example of how the focus of the scandal on Kelly, rather than on the large number of young girls he’s been accused of molesting, has worked to the singer’s benefit. Here’s Kelefa Sanneh, in the NYT, writing about Kelly two years ago:

Mr. Kelly, the legendarily freaky R&B star, long ago established himself as one of the greatest singer-songwriters of his generation. The sex scandal that threatened to derail his career in 2002 ended up doing the opposite: it made him more productive, more successful and, somehow—maybe because more people began paying attention to his excellent music—more respected than ever before.

______________

This guy has it down.

The Sun-Times’ story is now up:

As the first “not guilty” was read, R. Kelly dipped his head and kept it bowed during the entire reading of the 14-count verdict.

When the reading was completed, he dabbed his face with a baby blue handkerchief from his pocket as tears streamed down his face.

He then bear-hugged defense attorneys Sam Adam Jr. and Ed Genson.

More:

R. Kelly left courthouse to a huge roar from about 75 supporters.

“I love him!” one woman shouted. “I love him! Get that on camera!”

He did not comment to reporters.

A scene from the S-T’s always updating story. Note the subtle decision not to alter the speakers’ speaking style:

Outside the courthouse, Chicago’s Leshi Agee, 25, shouted, “We love you!” to the singer, then said “He looks so good. Bye, baby.”

Agee, who came with her three children between the ages of 10 months and five years, said, “I knew he ain’t done it because he ain’t that type of person. They was hating on him. He proved everybody wrong.”

Fourteen-year-old Kewan Mackey said, “I knew he ain’t do it. I knew he was going to win. Money makes the world go around.”

The Chicago Tribune:

“R Kelly was found not guilty because they had the best jury that Cook County could produce,” said Kelly’s attorney Sam Adam Jr. “Two things happened today. R. Kelly got his name back and [his goddaughter] never had to lose hers,” Adam said.

More:

As the verdicts kept coming in, each count not guilty, Adam said he heard Kelly saying “Thank you, Jesus. Thank you, Jesus. Thank you, Jesus.”

Kelly left the courtroom surrounded by his entourage, who kept reporters away from the singer and escorted him to a waiting sport-utility vehicle as some 50 supporters cheered him. Though Kelly did not speak to reporters, he did salute and wave to fans.

Allan Mayer, a Kelly spokesman, said, “Robert has asked me to speak on his behalf for now. Robert has said all along that he believes in our system, and he believes in God. And that when all the facts came out in court, he’d be cleared of these terrible charges.

“He did not expect that it would take 6 ½ years. It’s been a terrible ordeal for him and his family, and at this point all he wants to do is move forward and try to put it behind him. He wants to thank his lawyers who defended him so brilliantly. He wants to thank his fans who stuck by him and supported him with such love.

The Daily Swarm, earlier today before the verdict, had noted this oddly dispassionate analysis of the situation from a couple of industry people quoted in USA Today:

The trial “really hasn’t had an adverse affect so far,” says Chuck Creekmur, CEO of the news site allhiphop.com. “At first, I thought the accusations would be a death knell for his career, but it goes to show just how loyal some fans can be.”

Those fans are torn between giving him the benefit of the doubt and being turned off by the nature of the charges, says Cori Murray, entertainment director of Essence magazine.

“A lot of people feel he shouldn’t be judged,” Murray says. “There’s a feeling in the (African-American) community that we don’t like to air our dirty laundry, that black men in general are persecuted.”

A guilty verdict wouldn’t necessarily damage Kelly’s reputation. “An actual conviction won’t change people’s opinions,” Creekmur says. “In the court of public opinion, he’s already guilty or innocent.”

Kelly’s music output could continue at the same pace, too. “You see it a lot in hip-hop,” Creekmur says. “Somebody gets accused, and they record a ton of product so that things can keep coming out even when they’re locked up.

“R. Kelly has shown that work ethic and seems to have a Midas touch. He would probably move units even from jail.”

———–

Earlier in Hitsville:

The world’s weirdest defense summation

Everything you need to know about the R. Kelly case

R. Kelly Sexfacts™ IV: The Quantum of Solace! The complete prosecution case!

The Godfather Who Shagged Me: The complete R. Kelly SexFacts™, Parts I, II & III—Every barfy thing you ever wanted to know about the origins of the R. Kelly case

Targeting Jim DeRogatis—literally

More on L’affaire DeRogatis

The DeRogatis ruling

Bad craziness at the R. Kelly trial?

At the R. Kelly trial, they do things they don’t do on Broadway!

Ever hear the one about the guy convicted of murdering his parents who asked for mercy because he was a orphan?

The NYT and R. Kelly: Curiouser and curiouser

The NYT finally notices R. Kelly isn’t a nice guy

R. Kelly and the NYT: The Freaky Defense

Tribune, Sun-Times protest closed hearings in R. Kelly case

Secret hearings in the R. Kelly case

R. Kelly’s Publicist: He slept with my daughter!

The jury deliberated less than a day and acquitted him on all counts.

Story from a local Chicago TV station here:

R. Kelly has been found not guilty of child pornography on accusations that he appeared on a videotape having sex with a girl as young as 13.

The jury read the verdict shortly after 2 p.m. They found the R&B superstar not guilty of all 14 counts.

Impacting … , as Drudge would say!

One aspect of the R. Kelly case not often noted is the fact that the man in the sex tape at the center of the case gives the girl in the tape cash before they have sex. (And before he urinates on her.) I don’t know whether the act was quote-unquote authentic or part of the ritual of the taping.

The moment suddenly became high profile in the closing arguments of the case today. Here’s the Chicago Sun-Times on the defense side:

Speaking after prosecutors had showed the jury the notorious sex tape at the center of the case one last time, defense attorney Sam Adam Jr said that the girl on the tape had accepted cash before performing a series of sex acts.

Showing the jury a studio photograph of the alleged victim on a large screen, he then told them that if they were going to find Kelly guilty of 14 counts of child pornography, “you are going to have to call (the alleged victim) 14 times individually and collectively a whore.”

Barely audible, he whispered, “My momma told me when we were kids, ‘if you ain’t got something nice to say about someone, don’t say it about her.”

He concluded his argument saying, “How are you 14 times going to call her a whore?”

Ordinarily, you’d assume the defense in a case like this would base the closing arguments on a very close reading of the mood of the jury. In this case, either the jury has been assessed as being deranged, or Kelly is not getting the defense he might have.  You assume the judge is going to give the jury instructions (or, at this point, has given the jury instructions; it has already begun deliberations) that ask, essentially, whether the man is R. Kelly and if the girl is, or was, under-aged.

It’s hard to see how focusing on yet another aspect of the poor thing’s degradation is going to help the defense in the jury room.

The Chicago Tribune has even weirder details. The paper says the attorney made a different argument, too, to wit:

Wouldn’t a 13-year-old girl blab to her friends about having sex with a star like Kelly?:

“She is a 13 year-old-girl having raunchy, dirty, nasty sex …with a superstar who’s won Grammy Awards and she tells no one?” Adam said. “You couldn’t keep a 13-year-old girl’s mouth quiet about having Hannah Montana tickets.”

Here again, what’s the purpose of speaking like this in terms of influencing the jury? Wouldn’t any 13 year old know that she wasn’t supposed to be having any sex at all, much less “raunchy, dirty, nasty sex”? What’s she supposed to say—”R. Kelly urinated on me last night?”

… At 10 this morning. The defense goes first, and then the prosecution gets the last word, the papers say.

The Chicago Tribune reports:

Despite the high-profile nature of the trial, the case itself is not very complex, experts say. It boils down to two questions: Is the girl on the sex tape at the heart of the case underage? And is that Kelly in the video with her? Both sides will have one last chance to sway the jury of nine men and three women.

The paper goes into more detail here …

The lack of a cooperating victim is a central weakness in the state’s case, according to some legal experts, but others say she did nothing to help the defense.

“It used to be a fatal part of the case, until [defense attorney Edward] Genson couldn’t produce her either,” said Leonard Cavise, a law professor at DePaul College of Law. “As a result, they are in the same boat.”

… but, as has been the case all along, they don’t relate this directly to the charges in the case, which are related to child pornography, not statutory rape. Does the concept of “victim” even apply in a child porn case?

The Sun-Times doesn’t go any deeper:

Two issues make the case volatile, [DePaul law prof Leonard] Cavise said: Sex and celebrity. The tape shows intercourse and oral sex, and it shows the man urinating on the female. The shock factor alone could push the jury to a guilty verdict, experts said.

“You see a real possibility that the jury can go guilty because the tape is so disgusting” and jurors want to punish someone, one legal observer said.

At the same time, Kelly’s fame could prejudice the jury in the defense’s favor. “Everybody on the jury who likes R. Kelly is going to hold out for him,” Cavise said.

Studies show that 80 percent of jurors make up their minds before they have heard any evidence, Cavise said.

“As we go into closing arguments, at least 80 percent of those people have an opinion already,” Cavise said.

I’m worried that after the verdict comes down, the jurors are going to tell us it all came down to some obscure part of the directions the court gave them, which was never mentioned in the press coverage.

Incidentally, the Tribune’s odd handling of its R. Kelly stories continues. Where the Sun-Times has always had an R. Kelly main page on the web on which you could access all of the paper’s voluminous R. Kelly coverage, the Tribune’s promotion of this valuable archive online has been spotty. (Valuable to the paper I mean; it’s the logical place for folks around the world to find comprehensive coverage of the trial.) You need to find an actual R. Kelly story, and then try to navigate the (non-chronological) list of stories to the left to get up to speed. If there’s a home page for the paper’s Kelly coverage I’ve never been able to find it.

Now, it seems, some of the early stories in the case have disappeared, apparently because the Trib removes two-week-old stories and sticks them in a (for pay) archive. The Trib had an early deal with AOL and I’ve always thought it was an operation with sophisticated web folks around.

Is it possible, in 2008, that the paper’s web people don’t notice stories drawing increased attention and get to work maximizing the interest? What kind of numbskulls start taking down their on-the-scene coverage of a local story of international interest? Sam Zell know about this?

One interesting perspective I’ve heard about the R. Kelly trial is that Kelly, unusual for a rich defendant, doesn’t have a top flight legal defense team and may go to jail because of it. It always pays to bet on the rich guy getting off, of course. But from the vantage point of following the daily coverage of the trial in three or four places, the defense has not come off well.

It started with a ringing declaration in the opening statement that Kelly has a distinctive mole on his back—and that the man in the video in question didn’t. Except … when a video expert played the tape slowly for the jury, it sure looked like the guy in the video did.

The defense rested today, on its third day. Wrote the Chicago Tribune:

It was not the defense courthouse observers expected in the high-profile proceeding. There were no surprise witnesses, no gotcha moments, no explanation of how the raunchy video came into existence. During opening statements and the prosecution’s case, the defense offered many theories that it didn’t follow up.

Instead, Kelly’s attorneys seemed content to tether the singer’s fate to their intense cross-examinations of state witnesses, a now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t mole and the alleged victim’s absence. It may not be the stuff of courtroom movie scenes, but effective, real-life defenses rarely are.

The “victim’s absence” referred to in that second paragraph is another confusing thing. The girl police say is on the tape has denied it is she. But the Chicago Sun-Times reported something today that either I hadn’t noticed before or hadn’t been reported before:

Jurors know the alleged victim refused to be a prosecution witness. They’ve also learned she told a grand jury it’s not her on the notorious sex tape at the center of the case.

In other words, if the story is correct, rather than leaving the girl on a tape a mystery, jurors know she denies she’s on the tape—but the prosecution hasn’t been allowed to offer reasons why. That may or may not affect the case. Jurors are allowed to use common sense, and there are many obvious reasons the girl, now a woman, wouldn’t testify or even deny her involvement.

Something the papers haven’t really examined is how that will leverage against the specific charges in this case, which involves child pornography, not child sex per se. Assuming that the jury isn’t swayed by the defense’s fumbling attempts to prove it’s not Kelly, the only question is whether the jury thinks the girl in the tape is under-age or not.

After the prosecution wrangled nearly a dozen witnesses who placed the girl on the tape, the defense brought in three family members who said they didn’t recognize her. The prosecution countered with what news reports said was a pretty effective ploy—finding a photo of the girl that bore an eerie resemblance to a pose she was allegedly in on the sex tape. The prosecution made each defense witness identify the girl in one but claim it was not she in the other.

The Sun-Times also noted, however, that the defense can do anything—even put the girl on the stand at the last minute—until it rests its case. The prosecution has a day or two to bring back a couple of witnesses; the papers say closing arguments may come Thursday. Details on that are here.

———–

The Daily Swarm is also following the R. Kelly case closely.

———–

Slate’s two weeks’ worth of coverage is here.

———–

Earlier in Hitsville:

Everything you need to know about the R. Kelly case

R. Kelly Sexfacts™ IV: The Quantum of Solace! The complete prosecution case!

The Godfather Who Shagged Me: The complete R. Kelly SexFacts™, Parts I, II & III—Every barfy thing you ever wanted to know about the origins of the R. Kelly case

Targeting Jim DeRogatis—literally

More on L’affaire DeRogatis

The DeRogatis ruling

Bad craziness at the R. Kelly trial?

At the R. Kelly trial, they do things they don’t do on Broadway!

Ever hear the one about the guy convicted of murdering his parents who asked for mercy because he was a orphan?

The NYT and R. Kelly: Curiouser and curiouser

The NYT finally notices R. Kelly isn’t a nice guy

R. Kelly and the NYT: The Freaky Defense

Tribune, Sun-Times protest closed hearings in R. Kelly case

Secret hearings in the R. Kelly case

R. Kelly’s Publicist: He slept with my daughter!

I don’t know when writing about the arts became a profession that demanded such a familiarity with unappetizing sexual matters. Readers are hereby forewarned about what follows, and given notice as well that later I’ll have something on HBO’s documentary on Roman Polanski, which gets shown tonight. (Big question: Will it properly describe what Polanski did with the young girl that fateful night, or try to pass the incident off as the product of continental sexual mores?)

Anyway, the R. Kelly trial—its origins, the sex tape at the center of the trial, the music press’s almost uniform diminution of the charges against the singer—grosses me out on so many levels it’s hard to even write about this particularly little contribution to the coverage. But since it was printed in the Chicago Tribune, it’s worth citing.

Basically, it’s a little explication into the concept of urination as a part of sex, this based on one of the barfiest things in the whole case, which is that the tape at the center of the trial shows the man police say is R. Kelly urinating on the face (and—forgive me—into the mouth) of what seems to be a young girl. (In the tape, the man also asks her to urinate as well.) Here’s the first two grafs:

The elephant in the room at the ongoing child pornography trial of R&B icon R. Kelly is the fact that the man shown in the amateur sex video—the prosecution’s key piece of evidence—seems to take pleasure in urinating on his sex partner.

Tearing away from the heinous possibility that the girl in the video may be underage, a question on the minds of many who have followed Kelly’s case is: Who on earth would want to urinate on someone else, or be urinated on themselves?

I don’t see how you can “tear away” that “heinous possibility.” The issue in the trial—the only issue, really—is child molestation. Even if the girl on the tape wanted Kelly to do that it would still be legally and morally wrong. (Those who have seen the tape say she’s patently a victim.)

It does not seem like the hook for a little meditation about modern sex play. And in any case, here’s the article’s case that the act has moved into the zeitgeist:

The act performed in the video has gained widespread notoriety in the realm of popular culture. An episode of “Sex and the City” once explored the practice. Comedian Dave Chappelle brought the issue into millions of homes in 2003 with a mock music video in which he dresses and croons likes R. Kelly, guzzling a gallon bottle of water, spraying dancers with a garden hose and singing a song titled “[I Wanna] Pee on You.”

“Pee” isn’t the word Chappelle uses, incidentally. But for what it’s worth, in SATC, Carrie turns on her politician friend who is into water sports. If memory serves, the show’s attitude toward the practice was uncharacteristically illiberal. (And it was shown years before the R. Kelly video came to light.) I don’t have an opinion about it all, myself; I just think the article was an oddly detached look at a case that has suffered from far too much detachment already.

From Josh Levin’s Slate coverage, you can see how the prosecution is dealing with defense witnesses:

[…S]tate’s attorney Shauna Boliker performs flawlessly. After a few perfunctory questions to the day’s first witness, the alleged victim’s cousin Shonna Edwards, she begins the show-and-tell portion of the cross-examination. On a giant screen 10 feet from the jury box, the state displays a screenshot from a video put out by the alleged victim’s music group. Shonna identifies her cousin and band mate immediately. A few seconds later, we see a still from the 27-minute sex tape—if memory serves, it’s taken from the very beginning, as Sex-Tape Girl is about to receive a handful of bills from Sex-Tape Man. Shonna says that she doesn’t recognize that person. Boliker then has the photos displayed side by side. Both are profile shots, showing the left side of the alleged victim’s face, her mullet, and a slightly puffy cheek. They look the same. “Is it possible that it could be the same individual?” Boliker asks. “Not at all,” Shonna says.

Jim DeRogatis, the reporter and critic for the Chicago Sun-Times, has sent a letter to his cross-town rival, the Chicago Tribune, for encapsulating his refusal to testify in the R. Kelly case as merely taking the Fifth. The letter’s full text:

While the Tribune blog correctly reports my reluctant appearance at the R.
Kelly trial yesterday, today’s print edition does not.

According to the subhed, “Sun-Times music critic cites 5th Amendment to
avoid testimony,” while reporters Stacy St. Clair and Kayce T. Ataiyero
write, “DeRogatis invoked his 5th Amendment right against
self-incrimination.”

Taking the stand only on the threat of imprisonment, 15 times I invoked all
of my protections, clearly emphasizing the ones that most matter to me and
all journalists in this state:

“I respectfully decline to answer the question on the advice of counsel, on
the grounds that to do so would contravene the reporter’s privilege, the
special witness doctrine, my rights under the Illinois Constitution, and
the First and Fifth Amendments of the United States Constitution.”

Judge Gaughan may have chosen to ignore every other protection but the
Fifth, but I invoked them all and would never have separated them. Mr.
Dunn, who recently represented the Tribune before this judge on a First
Amendment matter, eloquently and passionately argued that I was only taking
the Fifth because this judge made it necessary by ignoring the First. And
that assault on our most sacred of journalistic protections is on appeal.

A legal attack on any journalist’s rights is an attack on all of us. I
would have expected better of the Tribune in reporting the Sun-Times’
attempt to stand strong against this unjust and deeply troubling assault.

Sincerely,

Jim DeRogatis
Pop Music Critic
Chicago Sun-Times

Lots of fun ironies here: The Trib is the home of DeRogatis’s radio partner, critic Greg Kot. Also, the Trib online went out of its way the other day to describe DeRogatis as a “renowned music critic.”

———-

Josh Levin’s newest Slate post on the trial is here.

————

Meanwhile, the Tribune has a new story taking a look at how the jury is holding up, now that the prosecution has rested its case, and the defense has begun:

Most juries feel a special connection with trial judges. This particular group certainly has embraced Cook County Judge Vincent Vaughan, laughing at all his jokes and shooting him approving looks when he lashes out at the attorneys for wasting time.

———–

The Daily Swarm is also following the R. Kelly case closely.

———–

Slate’s ongoing coverage is here.

———–

Disclosure: Hitsville is an old friend of Jim DeRogatis; we started the radio show “Sound Opinions” together.

———–

Earlier in Hitsville:

Everything you need to know about the R. Kelly case

R. Kelly Sexfacts™ IV: The Quantum of Solace! The complete prosecution case!

The Godfather Who Shagged Me: The complete R. Kelly SexFacts™, Parts I, II & III—Every barfy thing you ever wanted to know about the origins of the R. Kelly case

Targeting Jim DeRogatis—literally

More on L’affaire DeRogatis

The DeRogatis ruling

Bad craziness at the R. Kelly trial?

At the R. Kelly trial, they do things they don’t do on Broadway!

Ever hear the one about the guy convicted of murdering his parents who asked for mercy because he was a orphan?

The NYT and R. Kelly: Curiouser and curiouser

The NYT finally notices R. Kelly isn’t a nice guy

R. Kelly and the NYT: The Freaky Defense

Tribune, Sun-Times protest closed hearings in R. Kelly case

Secret hearings in the R. Kelly case

R. Kelly’s Publicist: He slept with my daughter!

The Daily Swarm analyzes an interview transcript between Jim DeRogatis and the singer Sparkle here. In the talk, DeRogatis says he thinks that someone with the initials “B.H.” left him the sex tape that has resulted in child-porn charges against Kelly:

Q. But is it partly that [B.H.] wants revenge for the whole Aaliyah thing? ??

A. I don’t know. I’m sure he would tell ya. He’d have no problem telling you.

Q. He never has. I’m sure that tape came by [B.H.]. Not directly. He’s wondering about the police investigation.

A. My career isn’t a fruitful as his, but…

That’s all exactly as the Sun-Times published the transcript. Kelly’s former manager, whose name is Barry Hankerson, is also the uncle of Aaliyah Houghton, whom Kelly married when she was 15. (Houghton, under the name Aaliyah, would go on to become a big star before dying in a plane accident in 2002.) Hankerson eventually left Kelly’s employ, some years later, writing a letter to his label that said in part that Kelly “needed psychiatric help for his compulsion to pursue underage girls.”

The Daily Swarm had speculated on Hankerson’s likelihood of being the leaker yesterday.

Update: To me, it’s obvious that DeRogatis doesn’t actually know who sent him the tape; in this context “I’m sure” seems to me a synonym for “I think.” I’m still not clear on what the actual relevance to the trial the tape’s provenance is. (It and others had been floating around for years; why focus on the few hours in 2002 that the Sun-Times had possession of a copy of it?) That said, it seems plain that Hankerson would now be someone that the defense would be interested in talking to, based on its contention that the tape has been digitally modified in some way.

Since, as I note above, Hankerson left the singer’s employ because of … what were the exact words … ah, yes, “his compulsion to pursue young girls,” I doubt the defense will bring his ass into court. This also spares Hankerson the ordeal of explaining in public why he continued to work for the singer for years after he married his 15-year-old niece.

Chicago Sun-Times reporter Jim DeRogatis appeared in court this morning and answered questions from the judge, taking the Fifth Amendment in each instance, the Chicago Sun-Times is reporting:

Outside the presence of the jury this morning, DeRogatis, wearing a dark suit and tie, appeared before Gaughan to answer questions in court from Sun-Times attorney Damon Dunn and Kelly’s attorney, Marc Martin.

After identifying himself and spelling his name, he gave the same answer to every question he was asked about where the tape came from, what he did with it and what he had written about Kelly.

To each question, he answered, “I respectfully decline to answer the question on the advice of counsel on the grounds that to do so would contravene the reporter’s privilege, the special witness doctrine and my rights under the Illinois Constitution, and the First and Fifth Amendments of the U.S. Constitution.”

Afterward, the judge released him from having to testify, over the objections of R. Kelly’s attorneys. The Sun-Times story also said this, however:

But urging Gaughan to force DeRogatis to testify, Martin argued that the statute of limitations protected DeRogatis from prosecution. Even if it didn’t, DeRogatis should be offered immunity, he said. Arguing that the Illinois reporter’s privilege and the First Amendment did not apply to DeRogatis in this case, he added, “Being a reporter does not give you a license to commit crimes.”

Siding with Dunn, Gaughan said that he had no power to grant DeRogatis federal immunity. He said DeRogatis would not have to testify, also refusing the defense’s request that DeRogatis be forced to assert his Fifth Amendment privileges in front of the jury.

DeRogatis will have to turn over his notes from an interview with Sparkle by 4 p.m. today, the judge said. Gaughan said he would review the notes in private to see if they reveal any of DeRogatis’s sources.

“He’s free to go,” Gaughan said, concluding the hearing.

Emphasis added. “Sparkle” is a onetime R. Kelly protégé named Stephanie Edwards, who recorded under the name Sparkle. She is also the aunt of the girl on the videotape that is at the center of the case, and has ID’ed R. Kelly and her niece as being on it. She was also one of DeRogatis’s original sources. Unless I missed it, the coverage of the case from Chicago has never explained why the defense wanted DeRogatis’s notes from the interview (presumably the one during which he played the tape for Edwards), or the grounds on which the judge ruled DeRogatis had to produce them.

Chicago Tribune’s coverage is here.

The defense’s case begins today.

———-

The Daily Swarm is also following the R. Kelly case, and Jim DeRogatis’s situation, closely.

———–

Disclosure: Hitsville is an old friend of Jim DeRogatis; we started the radio show “Sound Opinions” together.

———–

Earlier in Hitsville:

Everything you need to know about the R. Kelly case

R. Kelly Sexfacts™ IV: The Quantum of Solace! The complete prosecution case!

The Godfather Who Shagged Me: The complete R. Kelly SexFacts™, Parts I, II & III—Everything you ever wanted to know about the R. Kelly case

Targeting Jim DeRogatis—literally

More on L’affaire DeRogatis

The DeRogatis ruling

Bad craziness at the R. Kelly trial?

At the R. Kelly trial, they do things they don’t do on Broadway!

Ever hear the one about the guy convicted of murdering his parents who asked for mercy because he was a orphan?

The NYT and R. Kelly: Curiouser and curiouser

The NYT finally notices R. Kelly isn’t a nice guy

R. Kelly and the NYT: The Freaky Defense

Tribune, Sun-Times protest closed hearings in R. Kelly case

Secret hearings in the R. Kelly case

R. Kelly’s Publicist: He slept with my daughter!

Jim DeRogatis, the Sun-Times reporter who was anonymously delivered a copy of the R. Kelly sex tape for which the singer is currently on trial, did not show up to testify Tuesday. The judge debated on whether to throw him in jail and then decided to give him the benefit of the doubt and ordered him to show up today, Wednesday.

It’s not known whether he will show up, or what the judge will do if he doesn’t.

———–

Everything you need to know about the R. Kelly case.

———–

Josh Levin of Slate has a new post about yesterday’s events here.

———–

The Chicago Tribune has a story about the five biggest hurdles for the case for the defense, which is supposed to begin today. The first two:

•Mole, mole, mole: The defense told the jury during opening statements that the sex tape at the heart of the child pornography case would actually set Kelly free. Attorneys said Kelly has had a dark mole along his lower spine since childhood, but said the man in the tape has an unblemished back. A prosecution expert, however, showed the jury a freeze-frame image of the man’s back and there appeared to be a mole. Look for the defense to call its own video expert to dispute that.

•That’s what friends are for: Three former friends of Kelly’s alleged victim identified her as the female participant in the video. The young women, who are now in their early 20s and went to grade school in Oak Park, were adamant in their identifications, and no one suggested they had an ax to grind. The defense will counter their testimony by continuing to paint Oak Park as a place where normally bored residents leaped at the chance to take part in the seedy case.

For its part, the Sun-Times goes into detail about some legal comedy behind the scenes in the DeRogatis affair yesterday. The judge, for example, yelled at the Sun-Times lawyers for filing their appeal of his DeRogatis-must-testify ruling in the wrong court. The paper’s lawyers say the judge was wrong:

“You filed it in the wrong court. If you’re going to file a notice of appeal, you have to file it in the appellate court,” [Judge Vincent] Gaughan said.

But several appellate lawyers said the Sun-Times’ lawyers filed in the right place. Illinois Supreme Court Rules 303 and 606 call for notices of appeal to be filed with the circuit court, not the court of appeals, they noted.

“He’s just wrong,” said lawyer Joel Bertocchi of Hinshaw & Culbertson, former solicitor general of Illinois. “He’s just making a common mistake.”

———-

The Daily Swarm has a piece discussing who left the tape in DeRogatis’s mailbox originally. Some provocative speculations!

An unanswered question from the prosecution’s case: Why didn’t the defense ask each witness whether they had left the tape for DeRogatis?

———–

Earlier, the Sun-Times lawyer argued Tuesday afternoon that the reporter—technically—didn’t get a copy of the subpoena.

The judge argued that, technically, he could throw DeRogatis’s ass in jail in the meantime.

The judge, Vincent Gaughan, seemed to think that telling the Sun-Times attorney multiple times over the last week that he expected DeRogatis to be in court Tuesday a.m. had been warning enough.

———-

Hitsville is not a lawyer and doesn’t know whether the paper and DeRogatis have the law on their side. On the one hand, DeRogatis was handed a key—the key—piece of evidence in the case, and the defense has the right to determine the provenance of it, even if the testimony is, predictably, “We got it, we watched it, we called the police.”

But the issue is complicated. For one, DeRogatis is not, as the New York Times and the Chicago Tribune have been describing him, merely a “music critic.” He is a reporter, and he and his colleague, Abdon Pallasch, had been filing major investigative pieces on Kelly’s sexual proclivities a year before the tape came to light.

That original blockbuster story is here. The pair’s original story about the tape, more than a year later, is here.

That’s why DeRogatis was delivered the tape—and that makes his receipt of it part of news-gathering activities that should not be exposed to scrutiny by a court, particularly when they have nothing to do with the crime being charged, which was the actual filming of the video some years before.

Some of the questions about his appearance have been answered in court over the past few days. But others haven’t. Here, for example, is a Sun-Times posting about his testimony:

Gaughan said Kelly’s attorneys will be allowed to question DeRogatis about when he received the tape and what he did with it before turning it over to police. But the judge said they cannot ask whether he made a copy or ask any questions about his sources.

Aren’t those two sentences contradictory? The issue of whether DeRogatis made a copy is key because the defense has been making noises that those who have testified on court about having seen the tape should be charged with possessing child pornography.

As Hitsville has written, this is an interesting legal position. (Isn’t it stipulating the prosecution’s case for defense attorneys in any way to acknowledge that the tape might be child porn? That’s what Kelly’s on trial for, after all.)

Beyond that, the judge has apparently ruled that DeRogatis must turn over notes from his interview with Stephanie “Sparkle” Edwards. Again, from the papers it isn’t clear why these notes would be relevant. The tape was made years before DeRogatis interviewed Edwards—and DeRogatis’s reporting isn’t on trial.

On the other hand, the Chicago Tribune reported that testifying about the tape would not expose DeRogatis to possession of child porn charges—but only because the statute of limitations has apparently expired.

———-

The Daily Swarm is also following the R. Kelly case, and Jim DeRogatis’s situation, closely.

———–

Disclosure: Hitsville is an old friend of Jim DeRogatis; we started the radio show “Sound Opinions” together.

———–

Earlier in Hitsville:

Everything you need to know about the R. Kelly case

R. Kelly Sexfacts™ IV: The Quantum of Solace! The complete prosecution case!

The Godfather Who Shagged Me: The complete R. Kelly SexFacts™, Parts I, II & III—Every barfy thing you ever wanted to know about the origins of the R. Kelly case

Targeting Jim DeRogatis—literally

More on L’affaire DeRogatis

The DeRogatis ruling

Bad craziness at the R. Kelly trial?

At the R. Kelly trial, they do things they don’t do on Broadway!

Ever hear the one about the guy convicted of murdering his parents who asked for mercy because he was a orphan?

The NYT and R. Kelly: Curiouser and curiouser

The NYT finally notices R. Kelly isn’t a nice guy

R. Kelly and the NYT: The Freaky Defense

Tribune, Sun-Times protest closed hearings in R. Kelly case

Secret hearings in the R. Kelly case

R. Kelly’s Publicist: He slept with my daughter!

Curious about what in the hell is going on with the R. Kelly case? You can find the background in these articles:

The original Chicago-Sun Times story by Jim DeRogatis and Abdon Pallasch is here.

The pair’s original story about the tape, more than a year later, is here.

The Sun-Times’ trial coverage main page is here.

———–

Major Hitsville coverage:

The Godfather Who Shagged Me: The complete R. Kelly SexFacts™, Parts I, II & III—Every barfy thing you ever wanted to know about the R. Kelly case

R. Kelly Sexfacts™ IV: The Quantum of Solace! The complete prosecution case!

Will Jim DeRogatis be arrested?

R. Kelly and the NYT: The Freaky Defense

The NYT finally notices R. Kelly isn’t a nice guy

The NYT and R. Kelly: Curiouser and curiouser

Hitsville’s complete R. Kelly writings

————

The Daily Swarm posts constant updates here.

———–

Slate’s ongoing coverage is here.

———–

You can access the Chicago Tribune’s ongoing coverage here.

Jim DeRogatis, the Sun-Times reporter who was anonymously delivered a copy of the R. Kelly sex tape for which the singer is currently on trial, did not show up to testify today. (See below for earlier updates.)

The Sun-Times lawyer is arguing that the reporter—technically—didn’t get a copy of the subpoena.

The judge is arguing that, technically, he would throw DeRogatis’s ass in jail in the meantime.

The judge, Vincent Gaughan, seemed to think that telling the Sun-Times attorney multiple times over the last week that he expected DeRogatis to be in court this a.m. was warning enough.

New developments are in as of about 3:30 p.m. Chicago time at the Chicago Tribune site here:

Gaughan said it was possible DeRogatis was unaware of the ordered appearance and would not issue a warrant for his arrest.

“I’m going to give him the benefit of the doubt,” Gaughan said.

The judge said DeRogatis would have to appear tomorrow, Wednesday, at which time the routine may resume. One assumes that the reporter won’t show up again.

Hitsville is not a lawyer and doesn’t know whether the paper and DeRogatis have the law on their side. On the one hand, DeRogatis was handed a key—the key—piece of evidence in the case, and the defense has the right to determine the provenance of it, even if the testimony is, predictably, “We got it, we watched it, we called the police.”

But the issue is complicated. For one, DeRogatis is not, as the New York Times and the Chicago Tribune have been describing him, merely a “music critic.” He is a reporter, and he and his colleague, Abdon Pallasch, had been filing major investigative pieces on Kelly’s sexual proclivities a year before the tape came to light.

That original blockbuster story is here. The pair’s original story about the tape, more than a year later, is here.

That’s why DeRogatis was delivered the tape—and that makes his receipt of it part of news-gathering activities that should not be exposed to scrutiny by a court, particularly when they have nothing to do with the crime being charged, which was the actual filming of the video some years before.

Some of the questions about his appearance have been answered in court over the past few days. But others haven’t. Here, for example, is a Sun-Times posting about his testimony:

Gaughan said Kelly’s attorneys will be allowed to question DeRogatis about when he received the tape and what he did with it before turning it over to police. But the judge said they cannot ask whether he made a copy or ask any questions about his sources.

Aren’t those two sentences contradictory? The issue of whether DeRogatis made a copy is key because the defense has been making noises that those who have testified on court about having seen the tape should be charged with possessing child pornography.

As Hitsville has written, this is an interesting legal position. (Isn’t it stipulating the prosecution’s case for defense attorneys in any way to acknowledge that the tape might be child porn? That’s what Kelly’s on trial for, after all.)

Beyond that, the judge has apparently ruled that DeRogatis must turn over notes from his interview with Stephanie “Sparkle” Edwards. Again, from the papers it isn’t clear why these notes would be relevant. The tape was made years before DeRogatis interviewed Edwards—and DeRogatis’s reporting isn’t on trial.

On the other hand, the Chicago Tribune reported that testifying about the tape would not expose DeRogatis to possession of child porn charges—but only because the statute of limitations has apparently expired.

———-

The Daily Swarm is also following the R. Kelly case, and Jim DeRogatis’s situation, closely.

————

UPDATE: The Trib now says the judge may be issuing a warrant for DeRogatis’s arrest:

Court resumed–and still no Jim DeRogatis.

Cook County Judge Vincent Gaughan, an animated jurist known for having a short fuse with lawyers, appeared subdued and spoke in short, clipped sentences when addressing Sun-Times lawyer Damon Dunn. The newspaper argued that DeRogatis had not been properly served the subpoena and therefore had no obligation to be in court this morning.

“I’m not sure why this [hearing] was called,” Dunn said.

“It’s [to decide] whether to issue a warrant for your client’s arrest,” Gaughan responded.

The Sun-Times’ version is sketchier:

Sun-Times pop music critic Jim DeRogatis has not appeared in court yet, though Judge Vincent Gaughan ordered him to show up this morning at 10 a.m.

As reporters and lawyers gathered in the courtroom, Gaughan was seen leaving through the hallway at 10:15, whistling and carrying a manila file folder. He was wearing a raincoat, as if he planned to leave the building.

Court reconvened at 11:30, and Gaughan berated Sun-Times lawyer Damon Dunn for not showing up earlier with DeRogatis. The judge said he had called the hearing “to see whether I’m going to issue a warrant for the arrest of your client,” referring to DeRogatis.

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