First R. Kelly Witness Testifies She Had Sex With Him at 16
The witness, Jerhonda Johnson Pace, recounted a six-month sexual relationship between her and R. Kelly that began when she was 16 and continued despite his knowledge of her real age.
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Jerhonda Johnson Pace, a teenage R. Kelly superfan and a member of his MySpace fan club, claims that she and Kelly had sexual contact beginning in 2009 when Pace was just 16, reports the Chicago Tribune. Testifying on the opening day of a racketeering trial against the R&B star in Brooklyn, N.Y., Pace said she had told him she was 19, but after their first sexual contact she felt uncomfortable and showed him her state ID card proving her true age. Despite that knowledge, the two began six months of repeated sexual contact with the much older R&B star, and escalating instances of physical abuse and control.
Prosecutors allege it was part of a decades-long operation that leveraged Kelly’s outsize fame to target young victims, groom them, abuse them, and manipulate or blackmail them to keep them under his control. He faces a racketeering charge more commonly used against mob bosses, drug cartels and the like. Pace’s story combines many of the hallmarks of Kelly’s alleged criminal enterprise: sex with a minor, some of it videotaped; the strict “rules” he made his partners follow; isolation from friends and family; physical abuse; and finally, a hefty settlement payout in exchange for the accuser’s silence. In opening statements, the defense told jurors that such consistent patterns are in fact signs that the witnesses are unreliable — making it up because they know the accusations get good play in the media.
