The rap princess bodied by Remy Ma and dethroned by Cardi B Rapsody is set to testify in defense of her brother, who faces significant jail time after being accused of having sex with a 12-year-old.
According to the Daily Mail, 37-year-old Jelani Maraj is charged with felony rape charges, including a first-degree count of sexual conduct against a child and predatory sexual assault.
In December 2015, Maraj was arrested in New York’s Nassau County on charges of first-degree rape of the victim, whose name and gender are being withheld. Maraj is accused of having repeated contact with the victim, and sources told the New York Daily News that the child was someone he had “access to” between April and November 2015.
Maraj’s superstar sister, Nicki Minaj, born Onika Tanya Maraj, posted the $100,000 bond for her older brother.
According to his old Twitter profile, Maraj owns or previously owned a day care center.
If convicted, he faces 15 years to life in prison.
Jelani Maraj says that he is the victim of an elaborate blackmail scheme to extort money from his sister. Pitchfork reports that Minaj will testify that the victim and the mother demanded $25 million to make the charges go away.
The extortion claims are the latest in a number of defenses shared by Maraj’s attorneys. At the time of his arrest, Maraj said that the child had confused him with another person and that the matter was a case of mistaken identity. Later, according to the Daily Mail, the lawyers said:
Our firm has a good faith basis to believe that the complainant in this case has had intimate physical contact with a man who is not the defendant in this case and who is older than 17 years of age and who may have caused there to be physical evidence of repeated vaginal and anal penetration of the complainant.
To this point, no one has offered any substantial proof that either Jelani Maraj or his sister Nicki Minaj was trying to buy NBC.