On Monday, day 15 of the federal sex trafficking trial of Robert Sylvester Kelly—known to most as R. Kelly—a tenth accuser took the stand in Brooklyn federal court.
Identifying herself only as “Angela,” she told jurors she witnessed Kelly and Aaliyah in a sexual encounter back in 1993, when Aaliyah would have been 13 or 14 years old, according to The Daily Beast. Angela, one of Kelly’s backup dancers at the time, testified that during a visit to Kelly on his tour bus, she saw Aaliyah “sitting with her legs open” while Kelly was allegedly “on his knees in between her legs.” She said she “closed the door abruptly” and never spoke to Kelly about what she saw, making her the first accuser to testify to witnessing the two engage in a sexual act.
As for how she and Kelly met, Angela explained that she met the disgraced singer in 1991 when she was a sophomore in high school at a summer party at his Chicago apartment.
Per The Daily Beast:
During that get-together, Angela said, Kelly had a series of “young ladies” enter his room one by one to have some kind of sexual contact with him. When Angela was directed to go into Kelly’s room, the singer told her to “climb on top of him” while other “young ladies in the room” were undressing, she said.
“I was startled. I wasn’t sure of what to do. But I did what he said,” Angela said, adding that she was invited back to Kelly’s apartment the next day. Angela said she then saw Kelly “every day for quite a few years,” and eventually became the singer’s backup dancer. During that time, she said, Kelly forced her and the other dancers to have sex with him as payment.
“He told us to pay our dues—it was a requirement to be around,” Angela said, adding that he would also say “get me some girls or bring me some new talent.”
Additionally, Angela told the court of a separate incident in which she and other girls, including Aaliyah, were reprimanded by Kelly for breaking his rules during a tour stop in Washington D.C. According to The New York Times, Angela said she and the group of girls went to a 7-Eleven convenience store for food despite having been warned by Kelly to stay in their hotel rooms. Once he learned that they had left, Angela testified that he used sex as a form of punishment.
More from the New York Times:
“Robert told all of us we would have to put out,” she said. “It was dues time,” she added, explaining to jurors that the singer often presented having sex with him as a form of paying their dues. Angela said that she refused the singer’s advances. While Aaliyah was among the girls that Mr. Kelly had addressed, she was not aware whether the two had sexual encounters immediately following that incident.
Later on Monday, the second male accuser in Kelly’s New York trial took the stand, where he told the court of his first encounter with Kelly and alleged the entertainer began grooming him for sex when he was just 16 years old.
Identified only as “Alex,” he alleged that at age 20, their sexual relationship began when the singer “forcefully kissed him and licked his face” inside the back of his Maybach. Per the New York Times, the witness also explained how Kelly would often refer to him as “nephew” even though the two are of no relation. In addition to that, Alex also told the court of a time he was “gifted” a half-naked woman by Kelly for the purpose of sex. He explained how he was instructed to wait in a room he believed belonged to one of Kelly’s children, adding that it had been set up with an iPad, production lights and that Kelly masturbated while he directed him and the woman in different sexual acts.
While Angela was able to break away from Kelly in the “mid 1990s,” Alex alleged he was “brainwashed” by the singer from 2007 to 2019.