R. Kelly Presents … The Dropping of a Lawsuit

By Scott Smith in Arts & Entertainment on Jan 17, 2007 4:49PM

No, not that one. But we’ll get to that in a minute.

Chicago R&B singer and alleged sexer-upper of underage youth R. Kelly dropped a lawsuit against the suburb of Olympia Fields that was initially brought before the court when the village fined him for building a guard shack on the grounds of his home. While reasonable people could argue that Kelly should be allowed to build his own little on-site CTU, one has to wonder if he couldn’t have come up with a better legal justification than his reputation as “a nationally known, Grammy Award-winning recording artist.”

The suit was dropped back in November, and now that Kelly has agreed to pay fines and court costs, there are happy people all around. Olympia Fields Village President Linzy Jones even praised Kelly for his Christmas decorations, and no, we are not making that up.

So: one down, 14 counts of videotaped child pornography-related charges to go. This February will mark five years since the Sun-Times broke the story of a videotape that allegedly contained images of Kelly engaging in sex acts with — and urinating on — a 14-year-old girl. The singer was indicted on child pornography charges in June of 2002 (subsequent charges in Florida were later dropped after the search was determined to be illegal).

We realize there are plenty of complicating factors at work here: an uncooperative witness; evidence that’s difficult to watch, much less evaluate; and scads of money paying for umpteen lawyers. But come the fuck on. Five years? Are we the only ones who are curious about why the case has dragged on so long? We know some of you out there are clerks with inside info. Enlighten us.