R. Kelly seeking Trump pardon after alleged attempt on his life in prison

R. Kelly, the disgraced R&B star who is behind bars after being convicted of racketeering and sex trafficking in 2021, is seeking a pardon from President Donald Trump.

An attorney for the singer has revealed that Kelly — whose full name is Robert Sylvester Kelly — is hoping to be granted a pardon or have his sentence commuted due to concern that his life is in danger. In a Tuesday emergency motion filing reviewed by Entertainment Weekly, Kelly, 57, requested to be moved from federal prison to home detention, alleging that three Bureau of Prisons officials devised a plot to have him killed by another inmate.

“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 EW in a Thursday statement. “We believe that President Trump is the only person with the courage to help us. And our need only grows stronger by the day.”

Brindley additionally claimed that since filing the emergency motion, Kelly has been unfairly punished.

“Immediately after our motion became public, Robert was thrown into solitary confinement,” Brindley claimed. “He cannot make phone calls to his family. He has no access to commissary. He has spiders crawling over him while he tries to sleep. He has not been able to eat in two days because he’s afraid the chow hall food could be poisoned.”

He continued, “The worst of it is that they have told him that, as long as we keep up our investigation and our motions, it is only going to get worse for Robert.  This is why we need President Trump to step in. Because, otherwise, the corruption just continues.”

The emergency filing seeking Kelly’s release includes a declaration from inmate, Mikeal Glenn Stine who claims to be a longtime member of the Aryan Brotherhood and alleges that he was asked to kill Kelly by three high-ranking individuals at the Bureau of Prisons. Stine claims he was transferred across the country from Arizona to the Federal Correctional Institute Butner in North Carolina, and placed him in the same unit as the rapper.

Representatives for Kelly and President Trump did not immediately respond to EW’s request for comment.

In May, President Trump commuted the sentence of notorious Gangster Disciples co-founder Larry Hoover. Earlier this month, he stated that he would also consider pardoning Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs, the rapper on trial for sex trafficking and racketeering charges. 

“I haven’t seen, I haven’t spoken to him in years. He used to really like me a lot. I think when I ran for politics, that relationship busted up, from what I read,” Trump said at White House press conference. “I would certainly look at the facts. If I think someone was mistreated, whether they like me or dislike me wouldn’t have any impact.”

Kelly, 57, is currently serving a 30-year prison sentence after being found guilty of racketeering and eight violations of an anti-sex-trafficking law. During his trial, witnesses testified that they saw Kelly sexually abuse the late singer Aaliyah when she was a young teenager. Kelly denied all allegations of abuse, and his attorneys argued that all the sexual encounters with his accusers were consensual. 

Prior to that, Kelly was charged with 10 counts of aggravated criminal sexual abuse against four victims (three of whom were minors at the time) in Illinois in 2019. This came after extensive reports of sexual abuse allegations from Buzzfeed News and from Lifetime’s Surviving R. Kelly docuseries.

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Several additional allegations followed, including a Chicago federal case in which Kelly was convicted of producing child pornography and child enticement. The singer was sentenced to an additional 20 years in that case, though all but one of those years will be served concurrently with his 30-year prison sentence.