After R. Kelly filed an emergency motion seeking home confinement for fears for his safety in prison earlier this week, the singer’s lawyer is claiming that he is now currently being “punished” with solitary confinement for taking the action.
Attorney Beau Brindley filed the motion on Tuesday claiming that officials solicited an inmate to murder Kelly, who has since been placed in solitary confinement. Brindley says that Kelly has been cut off from communicating with his family, and that he’s sleeping in poor conditions without food.
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“Where he’s sleeping now, he has spiders crawling all over him,” Brindley tells Variety. “This isn’t protection — it’s punishment for pursuing this. So he remains in solitary, he has not eaten for three days because he’s been only offered food that’s coming directly from the chow halls that’s prepared by the inmates, which he was warned not to eat by one of the officials at the prison who we left anonymous for his own security.”
Kelly is currently in a North Carolina facility serving a 30-year sentence for violating the Mann Act and racketeering that involved the sexual exploitation of children. In Tuesday’s filing, Brindley alleged that government officials violated attorney-client privilege by intercepting his communications to convict him, and subsequently solicited an inmate to murder him in retaliation for attempting to expose their actions.
Brindley says that he was able to speak with Kelly on Thursday morning and intends to file a supplement to his motion that alleges further cruel and unusual punishment in the form of solitary confinement. “He was very emotional, he’s very upset at how he’s being treated and the conditions he’s having to live with,” he says. “He’s begging me to find a way to help him, because this isn’t right. And I’m going to do everything in my power to do it.”
That includes seeking a pardon from President Donald Trump, a course of action that Kelly’s legal team considered while investigating the government’s alleged misconduct over the past year, but has become a priority with the threats on his life. Brindley has spoken with Trump associates as recently as yesterday, with hopes of reaching the President to get his urgent attention.
“I think it’s a particular interest to President Trump because, unlike most people who come to this with an air of skepticism, [he] has a personal unique understanding of what it’s like to be victimized by prosecution teams and put through that experience through corrupt and criminal hacks,” he says. “He understands what that’s like, and when he knows that it’s being escalated to the point of a death threat to hide the corruption that we’re trying to put out there, he’s perhaps the only person that there is who is going to have the courage to pull the trigger and say I want to stop it now.”
Brindley explains that there have been further consequences of filing Tuesday’s emergency motion. Mikeal Glenn Stine, a terminally ill inmate who is a leader of the Aryan Brotherhood, gave a sworn declaration in the motion claiming that officials offered him freedom in his final days in exchange for Kelly’s murder. Stine says that he was transferred to the North Carolina facility to kill Kelly but had a change of heart at the last minute, instead informing him of what he had been instructed to do. After the filing, Brindley says that he was planning to meet with Stine next week, but that it was canceled this morning. He says that Stine’s current whereabouts are unknown.
Following the filing, which argued that Kelly remains in danger from other incarcerated members of the Aryan Brotherhood, Judge Martha Pacold set a June 20 hearing to determine the issue of jurisdiction in filing the motion in North Carolina instead of Chicago. Brindley is hopeful that an accelerated briefing schedule will not just address immediate concerns but forge a path to vacating the conviction.
“Ultimately, we’re seeing a great deal of interest in what’s going to happen next and how this is all going to turn out,” he says, “because it’s been a rollercoaster of facts and occurrences that have brought us to this place.”
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