Like singer, like manager? It appears that R. Kelly’s manager is following in the footsteps of his disgraced boss and is going to be spending the foreseeable future in federal prison.
In July, Donnell Russell pleaded guilty to interstate stalking charges in Brooklyn federal court, where he was accused of using harassment and intimidation tactics to quiet one of Kelly’s sexual assault victims. On Thursday, Russell was sentenced to 20 months in prison for those charges, according to the Department of Justice.
It was found that Russell used phone calls, text messages and emails to intimidate the victim and her mother. The victim has only been identified as Jane Doe.
More from the Department of Justice:
“For more than a year, the defendant engaged in a vicious campaign to harass, humiliate and threaten the victim in order to force her to dismiss her lawsuit against R. Kelly and stop speaking publicly about him,” stated United States Attorney Peace…
Between November 2018 and February 2020, Russell threatened to reveal sexually explicit photographs of Jane Doe and to publicly reveal her sexual history if she did not withdraw her lawsuit against Kelly. In November 2018, Russell caused a letter, with attachments, purportedly written by Kelly, to be mailed to Jane Doe’s lawyer at the time. The attachments included cropped nude photographs of Jane Doe with the following text: “the next two pictures have been cropped for the sake of not exposing her extremities to the world, yet!!!”
In January 2019, using the alias of Colon Dunn, Russell also created a Facebook page called “Surviving Lies,” and posted screenshots of text messages between Jane Doe and R. Kelly, according to the Department of Justice.
But, Russell’s legal troubles don’t end there. In July, shortly after he pleaded guilty to stalking charges, Russell was also convicted of making a gun threat to cancel a December 2018 screening of Surviving R. Kelly. The series from Lifetime laid out the multitude of sexual abuse allegations against the R&B singer over his decades-long career. He faces up to five years in prison for the charges.