CHICAGO — For R. Kelly, six years of pretrial delays came down to an agonizing 10 minutes.
As a court official began slowly reading the verdict for each of the 14 counts of child pornography against him, the R&B superstar clutched the hands of his flanking attorneys. He bowed his head and shut his eyes tight, barely moving.
As the official got to the last few counts Friday and it became clear Kelly had won a complete acquittal, tears streamed down the Grammy-winner’s face.
“Thank you, Jesus,” he repeated, over and over, said one of his attorneys, Sam Adam Jr.
It had taken a jury of nine men and three women about seven hours of deliberations to acquit the 41-year-old singer on charges of videotaping himself having sex with a girl who prosecutors allege was as young as 13.
After the verdicts were read, a visibly stunned Kelly dabbed tears from his face with a handkerchief as he stood up and hugged each of his four attorneys.
In the end, jurors said prosecutors didn’t convince them that the female in the video was who they said she was.
“You want to be 100 percent sure it’s Kelly and (the alleged victim),” one juror said. “What we had wasn’t enough.”
Another juror said prosecutors left too many questions unanswered. “All of us felt very much the grayness of this case,” he said.
None of the five jurors who spoke to reporters after the verdict wanted to be identified.
Several jurors said one weakness in the prosecution’s case was that neither the alleged victim nor her parents testified.
One juror said he just was not sure the female was who prosecutors said she was or that she was a minor — noting her body appeared too developed. Another said that while he was convinced it was Kelly on the tape, he had doubts about the female.
Jurors said the much-ballyhooed mole defense rarely came up in deliberations and played no role in their verdict.
Kelly, who won the Grammy Award in 1997 for the song “I Believe I Can Fly” and whose biggest hits are raunchy ballads like “Ignition,” didn’t speak to reporters as he left.
But a spokesman released a statement saying Kelly always knew that “when all the facts came out in court, he would be cleared of these terrible charges. . . . All he wants to do is move forward and put it behind him.”
