R. Kelly was charged with 10 counts of aggravated criminal sexual abuse of a minor, according to the Chicago Tribune. The singer/songwriter, whose real name is Robert Sylvester Kelly, was charged in Cook County, Illinois on Friday.
Cook County Officials have issued a no-bail arrest warrant.
The news comes a month after the 52-year-old singer was accused of sexual misconduct by several adult women in the Lifetime documentary Surviving R. Kelly. The women were all consenting adults at the time the abuse was alleged to have occurred.
Two more R. Kelly accusers came forward this week. Rochelle Washington, left, and Latresa Scaff, right, joined their attorney Gloria Allred at a press conference in New York City on Thursday, Feb. 21.
During the news conference, Allred displayed photos that the women claimed were taken on the night they met Kelly when they were both minors.
Sources tell The Blast the family of accuser Joycelyn Savage is currently in the process of planning a trip to Chicago to assist in the Kelly investigation.
Last week, Stormy Daniels’ lawyer Michael Avenatti turned over a VHS videotape that shows the singer allegedly performing sex acts with an underage girl.
Avenatti said the tape was recorded in Chicago in the late 1990s, which would put Kelly in his late 20s or early 30s. Avenatti said the tape has never been publicly disclosed or provided to law enforcement.
The tape is similar to one that was leaked online in 2002 and was viewed by millions of Internet users on adult porn websites. The 2002 tape showed Kelly urinating on a 14-year-old girl. Kelly was acquitted of 13 counts of child pornography related to that video in 2008.
Kelly helped launch the career of teenage singer Aaliyah, whose debut album Age Ain’t Nothing But a Number went triple platinum in 1994.
Kelly and Aaliyah secretly married in 1994 when she was only 15. The marriage was annulled 2 years later.
Aaliyah died in a plane crash in the Bahamas at age 22.
Photos by Monica Schipper/Getty Images, Michael Loccisano/Getty Images
