What Covering the Singer’s Sex Crimes Trial Was Like

• Insider reporters Haven Orecchio-Egresitz and Jacob Shamsian covered R. Kelly’s sex crimes case for seven weeks.
• It was a strange experience covering the trial due to COVID-19 restrictions. Kelly supporters crowded the courthouse.
• They describe how journalists dealt with the lack of courtroom access, blurry TV screens, and other difficulties.

R. Kelly’s trial was difficult for journalists to follow.

We weren’t physically permitted in the courtroom where the trial was taking place because of coronavirus restrictions, so there was a strange sense of alienation as we observed witness after witness testify about horrific sexual abuse via video feed from a chamber two floors above.

Each day, the TV screens in our overflow room were blurry. We were forced to squint as accusers relived the lowest moments of their lives so that 12 jurors could decide whether the R&B legend was guilty of a long list of sex crimes.

Kelly’s attorney Nicole Blank Becker often sat at the right of the singer and obscured his eyes. As if Kelly were a YouTube commentator, we could only see him in the zoomed-in breakout box at the top left corner. His face was barely larger than a nickel.

Kelly observed witnesses testify almost in silence. Kelly would occasionally furrow his eyebrows if a witness accused him sexual abuse. Kelly also sometimes bopped his head when a song was playing.

Witnesses often looked blurred on the video feed. In the beginning of the trial, one sketch artist used binoculars. Jane Rosenberg, the court illustrator for Reuters,sat in her place of honor in a front-row bench of the press public gallery every day, leaning forward and peering through her glasses to get every detail possible. Kelly’s witnesses were not identified by her, so she blurred their faces.

The court did everything it could to protect the identities of witnesses who claimed Kelly treated them humiliatingly. However, the court refused journalists access some of the video and documents used by jurors to reach a verdict. One breakout box displayed evidence, but most documents were too small to be read clearly.

Even though jurors were seated in Judge Ann Donnelly’s courtroom public gallery, we couldn’t find clues to the verdict from their faces because they were off-screen.

On a typical day, we took lots of handwritten notes and finished work from a nearby park

An Insider reporter found herself crunched up on a park bench Wednesday outside the Brooklyn Federal Court Building, racing the setting sun to file her story. R. Kelly fans danced and chanted as she battled mosquitoes landing on her legs and arms. As Kelly and his defense team left the courthouse across from them, the cheering crowd cheered.

It was surreal. R. Kelly is not the only celebrity who is being tried for sexual abuse.

Knowing how high-profile the trial would be — and that Kelly fans were planning to fly in from around the country to support him — reporters showed up for court between 5 and 6 a.m. ET in the first week. Many tired reporters sat on the Brooklyn Heights sidewalk until US Marshals opened the court doors to the media at 8:30 a.m. The trial was progressing and members of the media were able to enter the court closer to 9:30 a.m. which was a relief.

There were about 20 socially distant spots within each of the two overflow rooms that were open to the public and the press. Credentialed journalists could bring their electronics into the building. They had to leave the overflow area and move to the media space on a different floor.

Witnesses testified for seven hours per day while we took handwritten notes. Although the audio feed from the overflow room was not always perfect, we did our best to avoid missing a great quote.

On breaks — an hour for lunch and a 10-15 minute restroom break each in the morning and afternoon — we’d make a mad dash to the media room, where we left our phones and laptops, and transform those pages and pages of notes into articles.

—Jacob Shamsian (@JayShams) August 18, 2021

Lunch presented another obstacle because we weren’t allowed to eat in the media room. On rare occasions when we had time, we were able use the Brooklyn Federal Court Building’s outdoor balcony to finish our stories.

After each court day, there was the crunch. The media room would be locked down by federal marshals shortly after the judge had retired for the day. This allowed reporters to quickly grab their gear and race to find a coffee shop, bar or bench in a nearby park to file their stories before the deadline.

R. Kelly fans showed up every day and kept us on our toes

The harrowing testimony in the case and the air conditioning that seemed to run at a 40-degree temperature created a chilled atmosphere in the overflow rooms. Journalists and the general public were also protected by the US Marshals, who kept the atmosphere calm.

The calm quickly began to crumble.

Kelly’s fans showed up every day. They were initially placed in an extra room, but they soon shared a space with relatives and friends of witnesses. They often arrived early and filled the room to its coronavirus-restricted capacity, to the point where people directly associated with witnesses were turned away.

Insider reporter watched as marshals refused to admit one woman, who claimed she was the psychotherapist of Kelly’s accusers. This was because the public gallery was already full.

Kelly’s supporters were at one time moved into the same space as journalists. It was unclear what caused the incident, but some Kelly fans were believed to have been in an argument with an accuser’s relative.

After another singer’s supporter made a complaint, another R. Kelly fan was taken into custody outside the courthouse.

On a different occasion, reporters were made to “shelter-in-place” in the courtroom for about 15 minutes at the end of the day after a security incident. We don’t know what the security incident was.

As the trial progressed, the overflow room became increasingly rowdy. Kelly supporters cheered Deveraux Cannick, the defense attorney, as he interrogated witnesses and questioned accusers. As the accusers and their attorneys left the courthouse, others held banners outside and attacked Kelly’s music.

Time seemed to melt inside the courthouse

It felt as though Judge Donnelly never — not once — started the trial on time.

Ten-minute recesses became 25-minute ones, and 9:30 AM starts became 10 AM starts. Reporters would race, exhausted, to the courtroom to file a story only to see that the lawyers were not yet in the courtroom.

Attorneys would often venture into sidebars for long debates about the admission of testimony, evidence, and the scope of the questions they were permitted to ask. We in the public gallery couldn’t hear what they were talking about, and these sidebars were redacted from transcripts — when a court reporter was present at all. Kelly’s defense lawyer, Cannick, took five minutes to complete his papers. This punctuated his slut-shamey cross examines with boredom.

The reporters were left without their phones and began to draw in the overflow area. They drew drawings of dinosaurs as well as pigs. One reporter, with sparkly highlighters and highlighters, and a talent for drawing palm trees and gel pens, created their dinosaurs in the manner of Lisa Frank. A second reporter took a dare and walked across one of the wooden benches at the back of the room like it was a balancing beam.

The clock was ticking when Dawn Hughes, an expert on interpersonal violence, appeared as the final witness. She described in detail how victims of abuse attach to their abusers.

“They’re always trying to separate the good things about them from the bad,” Hughes spoke as Becker, who was a former prosecutor for sex crimes, listened attentively.

Hughes was told several times by Donnelly to slow down. Hughes was too fast talking and the court reporter couldn’t keep up.

One point during the trial, the clock had stopped.

Insider reporter, one of few journalists with a watch, was bombarded daily with questions. We eventually figured out that the big hand had struck eight at the end of the hour.

A long-awaited verdict

It took jurors about 10 hours to reach a verdict, convicting Kelly on all nine counts.

When the news broke Monday afternoon that a verdict had been reached, a very pregnant Insider reporter who’d just sat through two prenatal appointments in downtown Manhattan waddled at full speed — with a hospital band still fastened to her wrist — to a subway station.

She arrived at Brooklyn’s courthouse to find the building surrounded with far more journalists than she had seen from the overflow room. The TV cameras waited impatiently to see if there was any action at those doors.

Dozens of journalists swarmed Kelly’s defense team as they exited the building, making it impossible for them to move through a nearby park without stopping to shared a few brief words about what they felt were inconsistencies in the government’s case.

Gloria Allred (a celebrity attorney representing several of Kelly’s accusers) gave a statement. Kelly’s supporters then expressed their disappointment. One witness called the verdict racist even though most victims who testified before the court were people of colour.

A small group of Kelly supporters remained as the afternoon progressed, even though most of those outside the courthouse had left.

They hugged one another, sang the songs of Kelly’s darker songs and shared stories about the last time they saw him live.

“I just can’t believe it,” One woman shared with us that Kelly was last seen live in Brooklyn, where a jury had just declared him a sexual predator.