R&B singer R. Kelly was indicted Friday in Cook County on charges of criminal sexual abuse, following decades of allegations the singer sexually abused underage girls.
Below is look back on Kelly's past:
R. Kelly was arrested in 2002 and charged with 14 counts of child pornography, based on a 27-minute videotape that allegedly showed him having sex with an underage girl.
The tape was originally mailed to Jim DeRogatis, the music critic at the Chicago Sun-Times, who has been following the R. Kelly allegations for nearly two decades. It allegedly occurred in Chicago.
DeRogatis turned the tape over to Chicago police, which then filed charges.
Kelly denied all the charges, and he eventually went to trial in Cook County in 2008.
Cook County State's Attorney Dick Devine's case against Kelly included 14 witnesses who identified either Kelly or the girl on the videotape, but only one of those witnesses was able to testify that Kelly and the girl had a sexual relationship, and Kelly was ultimately found not guilty.
He has been sued several times over the years in civil court and has settled at least three lawsuits against him by women who each accused him of having sex with them when they were minors.
Although he settled all of these cases, he never acknowledged any guilt.
Two years ago, in 2017, the website Buzzfeed published a lengthy article alleging that Kelly was holding several women in a "sex cult." R. Kelly denied that story as well, and at least one woman denied that she was being held against her will.
Then an online campaign began in 2018, with the hashtag #MuteRKelly.
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Just last month, in January, the documentary "Surviving R. Kelly" aired on the Lifetime network.
R. Kelly has written that he himself was the victim of sex abuse. In his autobiography he describes being raped over several years by an older woman.
