Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/01/08/r-kelly-is-under-criminal-inv.html
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Hopefully this will actually lead to justice for his victims. It’s just open knowledge that R Kelly is a serial abuser with a taste for young girls and nothing has happened to stop him, maybe 2019 will change that.
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I wonder if it would make any difference if he has completely changed his behavior?
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It’s been a long time coming; I’ve been skeeved out by him ever since he illegally married Aaliyah when she was only 15. (And I’m still amazed by Aaliyah’s PR crew that none of his scandalous bullshit ever blew back on her career, even after the pee tape came out.)
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Narrator: He hasn’t
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“If he got acquitted next time, nobody would ever have a chance,” Ms. Loggans said. “Prosecution is very hesitant to do that over again.”
This is a perverse pattern of public prosecutors, the reluctance and often outright refusal to seek justice unless they’re confident they can win. Imagine if public defenders could choose only to defend clients they were sure they could get off.
IANAL, but this strikes me as pure careerism. Prosecutors’ prospects for advancement depend on their conviction rate, so the system selects for prosecutors prioritizing winning over seeking justice. On some level perhaps some of them are even willfully naive enough to believe they’re one in the same. No one willing to face reality can avoid being disabused of that delusion, but reality is often no match for emotional self-defense mechanisms. The reality is that the law is not and never has been blind (which is not to say it isn’t a laudable ideal for which to aim).
Which is why prosecutors eagerly hound students who download public academic publications to suicide, but blithely let sexual predators commit real crimes with impunity. And in few areas of the law is systemic bias more prevalent than with sexual assault.
Prosecutorial discretion combined with perverse career incentives is responsible for so many of the problems in our so-called justice system, but especially in its tolerance of sexual assault and rape.
It’s good these prosecutors are taking this case seriously, but it shouldn’t require a documentary doing the prep-work and shaming them into action.
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I saw “Death at a Funeral” and the skeevy older brother character (playing late 30s? Early 40s?), the whole movie was hitting on a family friend who had just turned 18. Like, “oooo, 18, that’s a beautiful number… you should come up and visit me in new york sometime… you like candy?”
So I figure at the end of the movie he’s going to get his comeuppance–
– but no. He drives off in her car with a shit-eating grin on his face. They might as well have had Chris Rock saying “boys will be boys”.
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About time, fulton county…
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…and hopefully set off a wave of investigations into many other musicians that are guilty of statutory rape and/or predatory grooming.
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In the late 1980s, Donald Trump was allegedly a regular fixture at parties where rich men picked up underage models. Trump allegedly remarked to a seventeen year old girl that she was the right age, not too young and not too old.
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Prosecutorial discretion is also the major driving force behind overcharging minor offenders (and alleged offenders) in order to scare them into taking a plea deal.
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Anyone interested in how this has progressed should read up on the work Jim DeRogatis has been doing. Aside from being an excellent music journalist and critic, he’s kept at this and been trying to bring some justice to these young women and girls for almost two decades now.
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The documentary featured a parent getting a girl out of the hotel room he had her in. So it seems like the behavior hasn’t changed and he’s still doing the same thing.
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That really is bad, I was more objecting to the use of the media in lieu of the courtroom.
That’s been part of the problem. He buys off the family and they testify that it wasn’t her. And then the alt media reports it as the man trying to lock up another black man for being successful and then the jury acquits. They don’t have many more options. They hgad to change the politics around this issue.
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