Law&Crime Sidebar - R. Kelly’s Lawyer Reacts After Kelly's 30 Year Prison Sentence

Episode Date: June 29, 2022

R&B singer R. Kelly gets sentenced to 30 years in prison for federal racketeering and sex trafficking charges. Steve Greenberg, Kelly's lawyer, joins Law&Crime Sidebar podcast to react.LAW&CRIME SIDEBAR PRODUCTION:Host - Brian Ross YouTube Management - Bobby SzokePodcasting - Sam GoldbergVideo Editing - Sean BauerGuest Booking - Alyssa FisherSocial Media Management - Kiera BronsonSUBSCRIBE TO OUR OTHER PODCASTS:Court JunkieThey Walk Among AmericaCoptales and CocktailsSpeaking FreelyLAW&CRIME NETWORK SOCIAL MEDIA:Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lawandcrime/Twitter: https://twitter.com/LawCrimeNetworkFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/lawandcrimeTwitch: https://www.twitch.tv/lawandcrimenetworkTikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@lawandcrimeSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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My fucking life! Y'all killing me with this shit! I get out 30 years! I'm my fucking real! Robert. That was R. Kelly in a 2019 interview with CBS's Gail King. And speaking of 30 years, R. Kelly is now headed to jail for the next 30 years of his life for federal sex crimes. So what does his current lawyer think about that sentencing?

on this sidebar presented by law and crime. I'm Brian Ross. These are the voices of mostly black and brown women and children that were heard and believed that the new justice was finally achieved. This is a victory for them for justice and for future survivors of sexual assault. Victims of sexual violence must be heard, perpetrators must be held accountable and our women and children must be protected. I hope this sentencing serves as its own testimony that it doesn't matter how powerful, rich, or famous your abuser may be,

or how small they may make you feel just as you believe you's the truth. That was Breon Peace, U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of New York, speaking to reporters after the R&B singer's sentencing, calling R. Kelly a predator and a criminal. Well, someone who certainly disagrees with peace is R. Kelly's lawyer, Steve Greenberg. Mr. Greenberg, thank you for being here. Good afternoon, Brian. How are you?

Well, what's the reaction to today's sentencing, 30 years behind bars? I think it's terrible. I mean, it's an abomination. It's totally uncalled for when one objectively looks at the facts. I know that people think that he got 30 years because he was having sex with underage women, but the fact is that the New York case involved adult women,

although younger adult women, but adult women, and it encompassed when Robert was in his 20s, 30s, 40s, and 50s. So the age difference got larger, but at some point it wasn't this outrageous thing, but it involved consensual sex acts with adult women that I think that, the feds, frankly, bastardized the RICO statute to bring the cause of action. And the women who testified today at the sentencing hearing talked about years and years of abuse and how he used his wealth and his talent to lure them into situations where he abused them. Right. So we had a bunch of women who came from most of them questionable for lack of a better

term, low-income backgrounds, who all of a sudden were living a rock-style life, staying in the nicest hotels, flying on private jets, wearing the nicest clothes, and they're complaining that now, in hindsight, that that was some kind of manipulation, I call BS. I say that was women who wanted to be you know group eats to a rock star none of these women complained none of these women complained then you know they weren't in isolation I mean they were around people they were around Kelly's people they were it shows they were at dinners they when

when they were out of the relationships none of them complained to their family or friends so I call BS the judge went beyond the prosecution request, and they said in their letter, the prosecution said that he showed a callous disregard for the effects of his abuse and has yet to show any remorse or contrition. Right. One of the things that I know his lawyer in New York wanted to do was put off the sentencing until after his Chicago trial. So she had him evaluated, and then the prosecutors said that those evaluations weren't credible because he didn't talk about everything.

But the fact is that because of the way they've done these prosecutions, if he had talked about everything in his life, he would possibly have been confessing or implicating himself in other cases that are still penning. So he was hamstrung, and I think it was completely unfair to use that against him. The evaluation said that he's not a pedophile. He has a sex problem. he basically, according to the evaluation, would have sex with someone if they were 85, just as easily as he would have sex with someone if they were 17. Prosecutors also talked about a network of enablers who helped facilitate his crimes. Who are the enablers? And what happens to that?

Yeah, I don't know. That's how they also talked about a racketeering enterprise, yet they didn't charge anyone else. I mean, if I was going to talk about enablers, I would start with Asrael Clary's parents who sent her, and this is all in the pleadings in the post-trial motions, sent her to meet Robert saying, you should try and have his babies. You should make him love you. They're enablers. They're her parents. I would talk about this sister of the young lady from, and when I say young lady, she was an adult from Houston, Texas, who. flew up to New Jersey or New York to meet Robert and went backstage with her sister. Who's the enabler there? The judge, Judge Ann Donnelly, went beyond, as I said, the prosecution request and said, the public has to be protected from behavior like this. What do you make of that?

What led to her decisions, you think? I think she certainly went way beyond what I thought was necessary. You know, sometimes we we sort of scorecard these things and say what we think someone's going to get. I thought that 10 or 12 would have been plenty. I thought she was going to give him 18. 30, I think she's just, I think she's misreading everything here. You know, Robert himself is a victim of very severe abuse when he was growing up. He's a victim of the cycle of poverty.

He's a victim of everybody turning the other way. And no one's saying to him, after he got in trouble in the early 2000, someone should have said to him, look, man, you got to get some help. You got to get some counseling. You got to do this for your sex addiction problem. Instead, they just let it go on because that made it easier for them to steal from him because then he wasn't paying attention. So maybe those are the enablers.

But I think the judge completely failed to take into account, Robert's history. But he is an adult. He can make decisions. He knows the difference of right and wrong, doesn't he? He does. But, you know, you have to think this indictment went back to the 90s. The first acts in this indictment, Robert was in his early 20s, his early 20s. Okay?

He wasn't a 55-year. old man. And after those allegations involving Alia, the other allegations in the New York indictment were adult women. Maybe they were young adult women, but they were adult women in that particular case. What's the next step for him? He's got other trials faced in Chicago and elsewhere. What happens next? Well, he's got a trial that's supposed to start, I think, August 15th in Chicago. He's going to have to get with his legal team. I suspect that they'll see if they can work out some kind of a deal concurrent with the New York case. I know he's got very strong issues for appeal in that case, and I expect him to go ahead and appeal that case. I still

have four cases that I'm handling for him in state court in Illinois. I plan on going to trial on all four cases. I plan on winning all four cases. And then he has a case in Minnesota, which is an absolute joke where they claim that he was paying someone to be a prostitute when in fact she wanted to just dance for him. Well, do you say that he denies any wrongdoing whatsoever? Well, I can't get into my conversations with him. I can tell you that I think that this prosecution for which he was just given 30 years is the greatest abuse of the RICO statutes that we've ever seen in this country.

And we should all be scared because what they did is they took a bunch of things where the statute of limitations, even if he had done it, it expired, and said, well, we're going to use the RICO law and prosecute them now. And if they can do that to him, they can do it to any of us.

That is the law, though. They can reach back, right? Well, the law is they can reach back. But, you know, Brian, want to get too far down in the weeds, but they used, for instance, and I've spoke about this before, a 1944 New York law making it a crime to transmit a sexually transmitted disease. No one had ever been prosecuted under that law, as far as I know, in the history of New York State. It was a misdemeanor. Because he took the girl from New York City to New Jersey where he performed a concert

and had sex with her backstage, and she was his girlfriend at that moment in time. They said it was a man act violation, making it a federal felony that supports a recal charge. That's quite a stretch. If someone says to you that they're going to take a misdemeanor case and somehow make it into a federal crime and give you 30 years for it, and it's a misdemeanor that no one ever been prosecuted under, I think you'd be pretty hard pressed to find any fairness. in that. Well, as Mr. Kelly prepared for this day, and how did he prepare for this day? Well, he's been locked up for going on three years now. It'll be, I think, three years in

July. And so every day, I think you're preparing, but I don't think anyone is ever prepared to spend essentially life in prison. I mean, I don't think he can prepare for that at all. Every day is difficult for him because he's got to deal with other inmates. He's a select celebrities. So, you know, every interaction you have to be concerned about. He's gone from a life of private jets and fancy meals and, and, you know, big Hollywood events to living in an 8 by 10 cell with a metal toilet with no seat. It's terrible. It's sad. Is he on a suicide watch? I don't know. That you'd have to ask the marshals. But how is he taking all of it from what you see? talk to him since the sentencing today, but I mean, he's a human being, and that's what I think

people forget. He's a human being. I think anytime, look, when one of my clients get sentenced to a day in jail, I feel for him. When they get sentenced to a year in jail, I feel for him. When I have to go visit him in jail, I don't like it. So I can't imagine what it's like having to actually live in jail. This is one of the more prominent of the Me Too cases, and one of the few cases. so far that involved mostly African-American women who were the alleged victims. Do you see some sort of agenda here by prosecutors? Is that what you're suggesting? I don't think it had anything to do with race. I don't think that enters into it.

In my opinion, I like to think that the prosecutors are above that. I happen to like the prosecutors who brought the case, but I don't understand why they brought it because New York really had nothing to do with this. Only the allegation of herpes took place in New York. Everything else was other places in the country. So I don't know. They didn't have a stick in the game, so to speak. As a final bottom line matter, do you see any way that he is freed anytime soon from being behind bars? I don't see any way he's freed soon, but I do believe he's got outstanding appellate counsel. And I believe that the Second Circuit is going to reverse this conviction. Now, that's going to take the courage for them to do what

judges should do, which is follow the law and not follow the public view. Do you feel there was this rush by the public? Oh, I don't think the public ever gave a chance. You know, I know you've done documentaries over the years, and I've watched your documentaries over the years in different shows. You would never have put on a show where you just trotted up eight, quote, quote-unquote, victims in the show and never had anything verifying the facts, never went to the scene, never had a third party talk about, yes, this is what happened, none of that. Yet that's what surviving here, R. Kelly was.

It was night after night of the same people saying the same thing and no fact-checking at all. The defendant's victims aren't groupies or gold diggers. They're human beings. As is he. As is he. And that's what they forgot. So they could say they're not groupies,

but when somebody flies across country to dress scantily in the first row, hoping that the singer notices them and then goes backstage, they're groupies. I'm waiting to see if they go and they prosecute some of these other people who have been with young women, the guy from the Rolling Stones and some of the other ones. Let's see what they do with those now. Or are they just going to... Thanks for joining us here on Sidebar. Please subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube,

or wherever you get your podcast. Sidebar is produced by podcast manager Sam Goldberg, YouTube manager, Bobby Scows, video and audio editor Michael Denninger, and Booker and researcher, Alyssa Fisher. I'm Brian Ross. Speak to you next time. You can binge all episodes of this long crime series

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