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Chicago Prepares for Trial of R. Kelly

CHICAGO — Al Capone was a murderous gangster, but the only way the authorities here could nail him was on charges of income tax evasion.

More than 75 years later, that sideways approach to crime busting has been resurrected for local prosecutors’ pursuit of the R&B star R. Kelly. Mr. Kelly is being tried on charges that he made a film of himself having sex with an under-age girl rather than for the act itself.

After endless delays since charges were first brought in 2002 — the judge fell off a ladder, the lead prosecutor had a baby, Mr. Kelly developed appendicitis — opening arguments in the case will finally be heard on Tuesday.

The singer is charged with 14 counts of child pornography stemming from a home movie he is accused of making about a decade ago. He has pleaded not guilty. If convicted, he faces up to 15 years in prison.

That the girl in question, who might have been as young as 13 when the tape was made, is now a woman is one hurdle for the state’s case. A bigger problem is that she has consistently denied being on the tape. Saying this is a criminal case without a victim, some legal experts already smell a fiasco.

“The girl will take the stand and say, ‘It’s not me,’ ” said Leonard L. Cavise, a professor at DePaul University’s College of Law. “If she is in any way a credible witness, and the prosecution does not have evidence she’s been bought off, how can that fail to cause a reasonable doubt?”

To get around this complication, prosecutors are expected to introduce witnesses who will attest that it is indeed she on the tape, as well as a woman who reportedly will say that, when she too was under age, she had sex with Mr. Kelly and the girl.

“This is a very weird case,” Mr. Cavise said. “It makes Chicago look like a laughingstock. It’s as if they said, ‘Let’s spend millions of dollars and six years, shut down an important courtroom, cause a media circus and end up either convicting him of nothing at all or on some charge that has nothing to do with what you really should get him on if he’s guilty: sex with children.’ ”

Mr. Kelly, now 41, was born Robert Sylvester Kelly on the poor South Side of Chicago. He dropped out of high school in favor of busking, was quickly discovered and has sold nearly 40 million records.

His interest in young teenage girls has been extensively explored by the local news media. The Chicago Sun-Times published a lengthy article in late 2000 partly based on a lawsuit by one woman, who said she was 15 at the time she had a relationship with Mr. Kelly. Mr. Kelly’s publicist denied the allegations to the paper.

In early 2002 one of the writers of that article, Jim DeRogatis, The Sun-Times’s pop music critic, anonymously received the VHS tape that led to the charges. The paper turned the tape, lasting 26 minutes and 39 seconds, over to the police, who gave it to the F.B.I. Mr. Kelly was indicted four months later.

A 2003 case, in which the authorities in Florida said they found a digital camera with images of child pornography during a search of a house Mr. Kelly rented, was dropped after a judge ruled that the pictures were seized illegally.

According to those who have seen the videotape — copies of it were sold widely if not exactly openly on the streets of Chicago for as little as $10 — it ends with the man urinating on the girl.

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R. Kelly

Mr. Kelly has owned up to unspecified missteps in interviews. He told the British newspaper The Observer in 2004: “In life, you have people that love to party. That’s me. People that love God. That’s me. People that love sex. That’s me. People that love people. That’s me. And people that make mistakes.” He paused. “That’s me also.”

In his music, however, he stokes his reputation. “I did you wrong, I admit I did,” he sings in “If I Could Turn Back the Hands of Time.” In “Don’t You Say No” he reminds a woman that he pays for her cheesecake, valet parking and hotel suite, asserting, “Now it’s time to please me.”

The trial is being held at the mammoth Cook County Criminal Courthouse a few miles from downtown. It is the highest-profile case in the court since the serial killer John Wayne Gacy was tried there in 1980, and Judge Vincent Gaughan is not taking any chances on a media circus. Many documents and hearings in the case have been kept from the press, something that local news media organizations have protested all the way to the Illinois Supreme Court, without success.

Jury selection was not held in open court but in a jury room; a rotating pool of two journalists had permission to attend. “This way the judge can control the flow of information,” Terry Sullivan, a lawyer and former prosecutor who serves as the judge’s media liaison, explained in an interview.

Judge Gaughan also issued a decorum order, essentially barring any lawyer, prosecutor or court employee connected with the case from discussing it. A separate order listed rules for the news media, including that interviews would be in designated areas only. A reporter for The Chicago Tribune had his trial press pass rescinded for two days after he quizzed a spectator in the empty courtroom.

He got off lightly. In December a woman in court on a charge of violating her probation snapped pictures of Mr. Kelly with her cellphone. The judge put her in jail for the weekend and had the phone destroyed. Last Friday he complained that reporters were sticking their gum underneath the benches. In what might have been a joke, he threatened to undertake DNA testing to discover the culprits.

Expectations of a full-fledged circus might be difficult to fulfill, even without the judge’s restrictions. On May 9, the first day of jury selection, when a fan or foe of Mr. Kelly could get on television just by showing up, the crowd outside the courthouse was minimal.

One possibility is that the crime he is accused of is not lurid enough for the all-consuming media maw.

“We increasingly see young teens and even preteens being presented as sexual objects in mainstream media,” said M. Gigi Durham, a University of Iowa professor who wrote “The Lolita Effect” (Overlook), about the sexualization of girls. That would render Mr. Kelly as less of an aberration.

She also suspects sexism. “As the Michael Jackson case showed, we tend to take the abuse of boys more seriously than girls,” she said.

There is also a theory that maybe the case is simply too weird.

Mark Anthony Neal, a professor of black popular culture at Duke University, had originally hoped there would be widespread discussion of the allegations, which in turn would prompt a conversation about the issue behind them: sexual violence against children in black America.

Instead, Mr. Neal thinks people are shying away from the court proceedings. Perhaps Mr. Kelly is not a big enough star, despite all those records sold, he said. Perhaps the case has simply been around too long, inducing fatigue. Or perhaps it is just too surreal to grasp.

Noting that Mr. Kelly called himself “the Pied Piper of R&B” in an album released shortly after his 2002 arrest, Mr. Neal wondered exactly what was going through the singer’s head. The original Pied Piper, of course, used his music to lure the children of Hamelin away forever.

It struck Mr. Neal as a strange reference coming from someone who was being accused of using his music to take advantage of young girls. “Either he’s absolutely demonic or stupid or crazy,” Mr. Neal concluded.

Whatever the eventual verdict, Mr. Kelly seems to be inspired by the case. During jury selection he rarely followed the wrangling that led to the choosing of the eight men and four women who will decide his fate. Instead he spent most of his time intently scribbling on index cards, taking dictation from a voice only he could hear.

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