R. Kelly Seeks Release From Prison, Claiming Officers Tried to Have Him Killed by Fellow Inmate

R. Kelly, who is currently serving a 30-year prison sentence, is seeking to be released from prison, claiming jail officials attempted to solicit a fellow inmate to kill him.

In a court filing on Tuesday, the disgraced R&B star asked a judge to be released from the Federal Correctional Institution in Butner, North Carolina. He’s serving multiple decades after being convicted in two separate criminal cases for several sex crimes.

Kelly claims a prison officer “illegally accessed and stole a series of phone calls and emails” between the former musician and a woman and his attorney, according to the motion. He also alleges a former cellmate stole “attorney-client correspondence” and shared the letters with prosecutors ahead of his trial in New York.

To stop this information from being released, Kelly alleges that prison officials tried to have him killed. In the filing, Kelly alleges that a fellow inmate, a member of the Aryan Brotherhood gang, came up to him and “disclosed that he was sent to FCI Butner by BOP officials who directed him to murder Mr. Kelly.” When he failed to go through with it, the filing claims the Aryan Brotherhood member also “had his own life threatened.”

Kelly’s attorney, Beau Brindle, added in a statement shared with The Hollywood Reporter, “R. Kelly’s life is being threatened because of his decision to stand up and expose the violation of his constitutional rights made by corrupt prosecutors who use Bureau of Prisons officers and cooperating witnesses to facilitate these violations.”

“Once it became clear that he was uncovering evidence of the corruption underlying the charges in his federal cases, a white supremacist member of the Aryan Brotherhood was sent to murder him,” the statement continued. “We are filing our motion to make sure that they cannot get away with it.” 

In response, Billboard reported that prosecutors filed their own documents asking the judge to strike Kelly’s filing. “Robert Kelly is a serial sexual predator,” prosecutors wrote in their filing. “He even documented his sexual abuse of children on film — creating child pornography — such that the abuse would live on in perpetuity. That abuse and harassment continues with defendant’s latest filing.”

Kelly was convicted of racketeering and sex trafficking in New York in 2021 and found guilty of child pornography and enticing minors for sex in Chicago in 2022. He was sentenced to 30 years in prison for the New York case, and to 20 years for the Chicago case, with both sentences overlapping.