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R. Kelly has formally asked President Donald Trump to commute his 30-year sentence, according to court records made public this week by the Office of the Pardon Attorney.
The request for commutation, as first reported
by the Chicago Tribune, is listed as currently pending and is not asking Trump for a full pardon. It comes a little over a year after his attorney Beau Brindley filed an emergency motion seeking the singer’s immediate release from federal custody to home detention, claiming that his life was in danger and accusing the government of misconduct.
In that filing, R. Kelly’s legal team provided a sworn declaration from a terminally ill inmate who stated that officials offered him freedom in his final days in exchange for Kelly’s murder. The inmate claimed that he was told Kelly and his attorneys were planning to expose damaging information, as the filing alleged that officials violated attorney-client privilege by intercepting personal correspondence.
After the filing was made, Brindley told Variety that Kelly was being “punished” with solitary confinement for taking the action. He declared that he would seek a pardon from Trump and had spoken with Trump associates in hopes of reaching the President.
“I think it’s a particular interest to President Trump because, unlike most people who come to this with an air of skepticism, [he] has a personal unique understanding of what it’s like to be victimized by prosecution teams and put through that experience through corrupt and criminal hacks,” he told Variety. “He understands what that’s like, and when he knows that it’s being escalated to the point of a death threat to hide the corruption that we’re trying to put out there, he’s perhaps the only person that there is who is going to have the courage to pull the trigger and say I want to stop it now.”
Brindley did not file for clemency but instead pursued a new trial, arguing that prosecutors influenced Kelly’s conviction by conspiring to steal jail correspondence.
The singer, whose real name is Robert Sylvester Kelly, was initially convicted of nine counts of a superseding indictment in Sept. 2021. He was charged with violating the Mann Act and racketeering that involved the sexual exploitation of children. The following June, he was sentenced to 30 years in prison. In Feb. 2023, Kelly was separately sentenced to 20 years in prison for child sex crimes, with the judge ruling that all but one year would be served concurrently with his previous 30-year sentence.
