A federal judge in Chicago on Monday shot down R. Kelly’s latest request to be released from jail despite claims the R&B star was pummeled by a fellow inmate while no one “raised a finger.”
US District Judge Harry Leinenweber also denied the singer’s request to hold a hearing over the alleged August jailhouse beating.
The judge wrote, “This single isolated incident does not suggest that the Bureau of Prisons is incapable of safely housing Mr. Kelly.”
Kelly is being held at Chicago’s Metropolitan Correctional Center while awaiting trials in Illinois and New York on charges including sex-trafficking and child pornography.
His lawyers claimed in a filing last week that footage provided by prosecutors showed that no one at the prison “raised a finger” to help Kelly until the attack against him was well underway.
In his ruling, the judge wrote that the inmate who allegedly beat Kelly, Jeremiah Farmer, had since been transferred to a different facility.
And the courts still view the disgraced singer — whose real name is Robert Sylvester Kelly — as a flight risk and a danger to the community.
Since Kelly was taken into federal custody in July 2019, his legal team has repeatedly petitioned the courts to release him on bail as he awaits trial but all of those requests have been denied.
