Bond for the R&B singer R. Kelly was set $1 million on Saturday after he turned himself in to the police in Chicago.
Judge Fitzgerald Lyke Jr. of the Circuit Court of Cook County said at bail hearing that the sunger was prohibited from having contact with any of the victims or anyone under the age of 18.
He was instructed to surrender his passport. Bond was set at $250,000 for each of the four cases against him. As of early Saturday afternoon, Mr. Kelly had not posted bond.
If he is convicted, Mr. Kelly could face a prison term of three to seven years for each count of aggravated criminal sexual abuse.
Mr. Kellyw was accused of attempted criminal sexual assault with a fourth victim. Court documents said that she reported the episode to law enforcement authorities within two years.
His lawyer, Steven Greenberg, denied any wrongdoing by his client, insisted that the women were lying.
“He’s going to be vindicated on all of these charges,” he said “One by one, if it has to be.”
Recalled that Mr. Kelly has been indicted before, in 2002 on child pornography charges stemming from a video that prosecutors said showed him having sex with and urinating on an underage girl. After six years, he was acquitted of all counts against him.
Jurors in that case said that a significant problem for the prosecution was that the girl in the video did not testify. More than a dozen witnesses identified her, but Mr. Kelly’s lawyers successfully argued that her identity could not be known for certain.
Allegations against Mr. Kelly stretch back decades, but the accusations received renewed attention after the six-part documentary “Surviving R. Kelly” aired on Lifetime in January.
The program cataloged allegations of abuse going back to the 1990s, and accused Mr. Kelly of holding women in cultlike conditions, keeping them from their families and exerting enormous control over their lives, demanding they ask permission to bathe, eat or go to the bathroom.
The allegations in the documentary had been made before, but the culture around sexual misconduct had changed tremendously since Mr. Kelly’s last trial, in the wake of the #MeToo movement and the continued fallout from abuse by Catholic priests.
In the midst of a ferocious outcry, his record label, RCA, a division of Sony Music Entertainment, dropped him two weeks after the documentary aired. Investigators in Illinois, Georgia and New York began looking into his conduct.
“I am cautiously optimistic,” said Kenyette Tisha Barnes, co-founder of the #MuteRKelly social media campaign. “The difference between this indictment and the last indictment is that you didn’t have the degree of public pressure to get him convicted in 2008. It was actually the opposite — more people wanted him acquitted.”
