R. Kelly formally asked President Donald Trump to commute his 30-year-prison sentence. Kelly, whose full name is Robert Sylvester Kelly, was convicted on various federal charges of racketeering and sex trafficking in separate trials in 2021 and 2022.
The 59-year-old singer/songwriter is serving his sentence at the Federal Correctional Institution in Butner, N.C.
Kelly formally requested a pardon, according to court records made public this week by the Office of the Pardon Attorney, the Chicago Tribune reported.
The request for a pardon is currently pending. Kelly is not asking for a full pardon. The request comes a year after Kelly accused three prison officials of plotting his murder.
“We are in open discussions with people close to President Trump. And those discussions have expanded and intensified since we filed our motion,” Kelly’s attorney, Beau B. Brindley, told PEOPLE in 2025. “We believe that President Trump is the only person with the courage to help us.”
One week after filing an emergency petition for home detention in 2025, Kelly’s lawyer Beau B. Brindley claimed his client overdosed on medication that prison staff gave him. He said Kelly was hospitalized on June 13, 2025.
Brindley praised Trump as a man who knows what it’s like to be “victimized by prosecution teams”.
“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,” Brindley 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.”
In 2023, four criminal indictments were filed against Trump in New York, Georgia, Florida, and Washington, D.C.
He was convicted in New York, but charges were dropped in the Georgia case and the two federal cases.