Jurors hear key testimony from reputed fixer in alleged R. Kelly conspiracy to derail early criminal probe
CHICAGO — Jurors in R. Kelly’s federal child pornography trial on Tuesday heard a tale seemingly ripped from a B-movie script: Clandestine hotel meetings. Sex tapes. Bags filled with cash. Tough guys with guns.
But this was no movie, according to Charles Freeman, a key prosecution witness who was at the center of it all.
Instead, Freeman said, it was a real-life cloak-and-dagger scheme orchestrated by Kelly and his associates to recover video footage of the R&B superstar allegedly sexually assaulting a 14-year-old girl. Freeman was paid hundreds of thousands of dollars over the years in exchange for getting at least one of the tapes back, he said.
The plot as described by Freeman spanned almost a decade, and unfolded in cities from Chicago to Kansas City and Atlanta, at Kelly’s music studio, concert venues and even the singer’s sprawling Olympia Fields, Illinois, mansion, where Freeman said he was told to strip naked and get in a pool to prove he wasn’t wearing a wire.
Attorneys for
