R. Kelly is said to be in fear for his life amid claims that Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) officials are colluding with an inmate to have him killed behind bars, per multiple reports.
People, Variety and Billboard report that Kelly’s legal team, including attorney Beau B. Brindley, filed an emergency motion in Chicago on Tuesday, June 10, requesting the “Ignition” singer, 58, be released from a federal prison in Butner, North Carolina, and placed in home detention on temporary furlough.
The Tuesday court filing alleges that three BOP officials solicited fellow inmate Mikeal Glenn Stine, who claims to be a member of the Aryan Brotherhood, to murder Kelly and transferred him from an Arizona prison to the same penitentiary — and unit — as the singer in March to carry out the deed, per the reports.
In a sworn declaration filed alongside the motion, Stine reportedly claimed that officials told him Kelly and his legal team were planning to expose alleged misconduct. (In the filing, Kelly’s team accused prison officials of conspiring with Kelly’s former cellmate to intercept correspondence between him and his attorneys, violating client-attorney privilege, per Variety.)
Kline, who is terminally ill, further alleged that he was told by officials he would be a “free man” if he carried out the killing, a proposal that appealed to him because he didn’t have much longer to live, according to reports. Kline said that officials told him they would help him escape from custody and/or avoid conviction, per People and Variety.
Stine claimed that he initially planned to carry out the murder plot and surveilled Kelly for some weeks but ultimately had a change of heart and alerted Kelly to the danger.
Kelly’s attorneys said in their motion that they recently learned of a plot to have a second member of the Aryan Brotherhood kill both Kelly and Stine.
“The threat to Mr. Kelly’s life continues each day that no action is taken,” they wrote in the filing. “More A.B. members are accumulating at his facility. More than one has already been approached about carrying out his murder. One of them will surely do what Mr. Stine has not, thereby burying the truth about what happened in this case along with Robert Kelly.”
“The Federal Bureau of Prisons does not comment on pending litigation or matters that are the subject of legal proceedings,” a Federal Bureau of Prisons representative for Kelly’s prison, FCC Butner, told Us Weekly in a statement on Wednesday, June 11.
Us Weekly has contacted the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of Illinois, which encompasses Chicago, for comment.
“The evidence we have before us demonstrates the weaponization of the D.O.J. to pursue a public figure through corrupt and criminal means,” Kelly’s attorney Brindley told Us in a statement. “The people responsible would have Mr. Kelly killed rather than see their corruption exposed. This is precisely the kind prosecutorial corruption that President [Donald] Trump has vowed to eradicate. We believe he is the only one with both the power and the courage to do it. And we will surely seek whatever help he can provide us in this fight.”
The statement continued, “Prosecutions of public figures have become win-at-all-cost endeavors. Federal prosecutors have become so consumed by winning and destroying public figures that they are willing to sacrifice the integrity of process in the pursuit of convictions. We are bringing this motion and those that follow it for the purpose of making sure that they do not get away with it.”
Kelly, real name Robert Sylvester Kelly, is serving 30 years in prison following his 2021 conviction in a New York court on charges including sex trafficking and racketeering. He began his sentence the following year.
In 2023, he was sentenced to another 20 years in a Chicago courtroom following a 2022 conviction for possession of child pornography. The judge in the latter sentencing ruled that the majority of the second sentence would run concurrently with his first sentence.
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