R. Kelly allegedly went to extreme measures to keep his alleged victims quiet. More people who say they’ve been victims of Kelly’s mistreatment over the years are taking the stand in his Brooklyn, New York sex abuse and sex trafficking criminal case. The Root reports that a woman testified that Kelly paid her $200,000 after he exposed her to herpes after he failed to disclose his status. The woman’s testimony marks the second person since the trial started that claims they’d contracted the STI from the disgraced R&B singer after being intimate with him.
The woman told jurors that she met Kelly through a mutual friend in 2001 when she was 27. She claims she was forthcoming about her fear of STIs when they began a sexual relationship. The woman says Kelly firmly said “no” when she requested he use protection during intercourse.
In a pretrial memorandum, the report notes that prosecutors claim “some of the six complaining witnesses against Kelly and some of the uncharged-crimes witnesses told Kelly he exposed them to an incurable sexually transmitted disease, and thus he knew he could transmit it to others. Prosecutors must prove that knowledge in order to establish the mulitple racketeering counts Kelly is facing in the trial.”
Kelly’s primary care physician testified that she began treating the singer for herpes in 2007, but says he may have known about his infection years prior. One of Kelly’s former girlfriends, Faith Rodgers, who was also featured in the Lifetime docuseries Surviving R. Kelly, also testified that Kelly exposed her to herpes and did so intentionally. She says she met him when she was 19-years-old backstage at a concert.
During their first sexual encounter, she admits they did not use a condom. “I said, ‘Are you going to use a condom?,'” she recalled asking Mr. Kelly during their first sexual encounter. “He said, ‘We don’t need a condom.'”
She says five days later, her mouth broke out in “disgusting bumps” and went to urgent care, where she tested positive for herpes. She says she reached out to Kelly but he wouldn’t answer her calls, noting, “I really just wanted him to maybe give me answers — or just acknowledge that he did it,” she testified, per the New York Times. “I knew it was him.” She later sued Kelly over the ordeal.