A new charge has been filed against an already embattled R.Kelly for bribing an official to get a fake ID to marry Aaliyah, two decades ago.
According to Federal prosecutors, singer R. Kelly schemed with others to pay for a fake ID for an unnamed female a day before he married R&B singer Aaliyah, then 15 years old, in a secret ceremony in 1994.
The revised indictment filed Thursday in New York, accuses Kelly of paying a bribe in exchange for a “fraudulent identification document” for someone identified only as “Jane Doe” on Aug. 30, 1994.
And a day after acquiring the document, Kelly, then 27, married Aaliyah in a secret ceremony arranged by Kelly at a hotel in Chicago. The marriage was annulled months later because of her age.
The Brooklyn prosecutors had already charged R. Kelly with racketeering, kidnapping, forced labor and sexual exploitation. They alleged he and his employees and assistants picked out women and girls at concerts and groomed them for sexual abuse.
The 52-year-old singer, who is being held without bond, is scheduled to stand trial in federal court in Chicago in April on child pornography and obstruction of justice charges before facing trial in Brooklyn. Kelly, whose given name is Robert Sylvester Kelly, was acquitted in 2008 on charges of videotaping himself having sex with a girl who prosecutors allege was as young as 13.
Aaliyah died in a plane crash in 2001 at age 22.