An attorney for R. Kelly has filed an explosive motion in Illinois asking that the R&B singer’s federal conviction on racketeering, sexual misconduct and other charges be vacated, alleging massive prosecutorial corruption and manipulation of the 2021 trial’s key witness as he attempts to get his client placed in home detention amid ongoing claims of a murder-for-hire plot involving North Carolina prison officials.
On Friday, attorney Beau B. Brindley filed a Motion for New trial and an Emergency Motion for Bond on behalf of Kelly, 58, who is serving a 31-year combined sentence at FCI Butner Medium I in North Carolina after a 2021 conviction for violations of the Mann Act and Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, and a 2022 conviction for production of child pornography. The new motion, citing newly discovered evidence, alleges a massive, coordinated campaign against Kelly by Northern District of Illinois prosecutors, who are accused of being dead-set on putting Kelly behind bars after he was acquitted in 2008 on child pornography charges.
“In their zeal to become Me Too [sic] warriors who brought down R. Kelly, federal prosecutors and Bureau of Prisons officers have intimidated witnesses, obstructed justice, and violated Mr. Kelly’s constitutional rights,” Brindley said in a statement sent to The Hollywood Reporter. “Our motion sets forth the entire sordid story of both the crimes they committed in pursuing Kelly, and of the plot to forever silence him to prevent these crimes from being exposed. We will not rest until Mr. Kelly is free.”
In the motion, filed in the United States District Court Northern District Of Illinois Eastern Division, Kelly alleges that prosecutors used Bureau of Prisons officials and cooperating witnesses to break the law, commit crimes, and then “knowingly and intentionally and repeatedly violate Mr. Kelly’s constitutional rights.”
This remarkable filing comes on the heels of a federal judge’s Thursday denial of an emergency request from Kelly to be released from prison to home confinement. The disgraced music star had sought release from the North Carolina prison amid allegations that Bureau of Prisons officials had compelled another inmate to murder him. Kelly was hospitalized this week for an apparent drug overdose after, according to his attorney, he was given a lethal dose of his medication while being held in solitary confinement; once a two-week hospital stay was requested of prison officials so Kelly could have a medical procedure performed, he was allegedly forcibly removed by BOP officials and taken back to solitary confinement. Brindley says he is also converted because Kelly has blood clots in his lungs.
Brindley said that he was unable to get a legal phone call with Kelly until June 13 and that Kelly had not eaten anything from June 10-12. He then filed the emergency motion for home detention this week. But on Thursday, Judge Martha Pacold ruled that he had brought this recent request to the wrong court and explained that she did not have the jurisdiction to make a decision over such claims. On Friday, Brindley filed his latest explosive motions that claim Kelly was a victim of corrupt prosecutors and then a murderous Board of Prisons, members of which are relentlessly trying to kill him.
On Friday. Brindley’s office provided The Hollywood Reporter with a flurry of legal documents, including a signed declaration purportedly from Mikael Glenn Stein, a kingpin in the Aryan Brotherhood prison gang. In the declaration, the inmate explains how he did the bidding of the Bureau of Prisons in exchange for better treatment and privileges while in prison, working directly for a BOP official he names as “Childress.”
“At the direction of Childress, I have ordered multiple assaults and murders at various institutions, which have been carried out by A.B. [Aryan Brotherhood] members, pursuant to my directions,” he wrote. “I have personally participated in some of these acts of violence. In exchange for ordering and/or participating in these acts of violence, I, and other members of the A.B. have received special privileges within the prisons in which we are housed. These privileges include no shakedowns, no cell searches and the ability to freely traffic drugs within the institution.”
Stein, who has terminal cancer, according to the Motion for New Trial, wrote in the declaration that he can provide the names of those he’s “ordered beaten and killed at the explicit direction” of the BOP. The declaration explains how he was approached in February 2023 by Childress and was in a prison meeting with no security present with him and USP Tucson Warden Gutierrez, along with the prison’s Associate Warden Stangl. In that meeting, he was told that he’d be sent to USP.
“Childress told me that I would be sent to FCI Butner. He said I would go to the medical center first; and I would then be moved to Kelly’s unit. There, Childress told me that I was to execute R. Kelly,” the declaration reads.
Stein, however, had a change of heart and decided not to help the BOP officials any further, as stated in the signed declaration. Closing out his missive to the court, Stein said that he is not confessing all of this information to help Kelly, who he believes should pay for his crimes after his sensational trial and 2021 RICO conviction.
But that conviction came with copious corruption from prosecutors and the BOP, who are now accused of attempting to murder Kelly, so none of their misdeeds are exposed.
Brindley’s office also provided a signed declaration from a former inmate and roommate of Kelly, Kishan Modugumudi, stating that, ahead of his trial, he was enlisted to steal Kelly’s correspondence with his lawyer and his private emails. The legal correspondence was used to gain an unfair and “unconstitutional advantage over Mr. Kelly by giving prosecutors insight into his strategy” with his team.
Finally, the motion filed by Kelly’s attorney on Friday also accuses prosecutors of enticing the key witness in Kelly’s conviction in 2021 to change her sworn testimony from his 2008 trial. In that initial case, the woman who testified as “Jane” affirmed that she is not a woman seen in a damning piece of video footage that became one of the trial’s most relevant pieces of evidence.
“Over the last year, we have discovered that the road to [Jane’s 2021] testimony was paved by threats, empty promises, crimes and constitutional violations,” the motion states. “In order to have their ‘victim’ go after R. Kelly — the public figure they were intent on bringing down — prosecutors are the ones that did the victimizing. They made an unwilling person play the role of victim to serve their desires for the grandeur of bringing down a larger-than-life public figure within the sanctimonious buzz of the Me Too movement. And they did it through crime, threat, and coercion.”
“This is the very essence of illegally weaponizing the Department of Justice to pursue a public figure,” the motion from Brindley states.
In a related announcement, Brindley informed the press this past week that he will be petitioning President Donald Trump to pardon his client. Trump and Kelly have no prior relationship to speak of, but the singer did reside in Trump Tower in Chicago’s Loop district until his arrest.
The Board of Prisons has stated that it will not be commenting on this story or any other request with litigation pending. The United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois has not issued any statement on the motion and new evidence as of Friday evening and officials could not be reached by THR ahead of publication.