R. Kelly fired his former legal team and hired Bill Cosby’s attorney Jennifer Bonjean to represent him.
The star is asking for a new trial and wants to be acquitted.
Bonjean wrote that his previous legal team “disbanded just weeks before the start of the trial.”
In a separate petition, she wrote that Kelly’s federal prosecutors were influenced by #MeToo: “Spurred by an influential social movement determined to punish male misconduct centuries through symbolic prosecutions, the government prosecuted RICO against Defendants.’ from the drafters’ intentions.”
R KELLY THANKS THANK YOU FOR MY SUPPORT
Prosecutors have until March 10 to respond.
Kelly was convicted federally of fraud and sex trafficking in a decades-long scheme to recruit underage women and girls for sex. You can spend the rest of your life behind bars.
“We are of course disappointed in the verdict,” Kelly’s former attorney, Deveraux L. Cannick, said at the time. “I’m even more disappointed that the prosecution brought this case,” he said, adding that it was “full of contradictions.”
