In the end, Kelly wound up with a jury of eight whites and four blacks, nine men and three women, half middle-aged and half young adults. Hailing from throughout Cook County and working a wide variety of jobs, the jury presented a panoply of Chicago.
Juror No. 69 worked as a vice president of national accounts, listened to NPR, read the Wall Street Journal, and thought “child porn is as low as it gets.” The wife of a Baptist preacher, No. 6 lived near Kelly’s mansion in Olympia Fields, but said she didn’t know about the case and had “not heard the local scuttlebutt.” No. 9, a devout Christian, worked in telecommunications and knew Kelly only from “I Believe I Can Fly.” Asked about pornography, he said, “I don’t like going to 7-Eleven and seeing it, but if a person wants it, it’s their right.” No. 21 studied criminal justice and wanted to become a cop. Gaughan delayed the start of the trial by a day so she could take her final exam.
Juror No. 22 said he read the newspaper every morning, but he hated the Sun-Times. No. 23 worked as a compliance officer at a downtown investment firm, sported an “Impeach Bush” button on his book bag, and knew a victim of sexual abuse. He assured the court he could be fair. No. 32 was a teaching assistant at Saint Agatha Catholic Academy in the Lawndale neighborhood, where Rev. Daniel McCormack had served before pleading guilty in 2007 to sexually abusing five boys ages eight to twelve. That case had been overseen by Kelly’s chief prosecutor, Shauna Boliker.
A culinary student, Juror No. 40 heard about the Kelly case on TV and radio, but assured the judge he’d paid little attention. No. 44 had seen a blurred clip from the video on TV, but the man, who owned a financial company, said he had no opinion. No. 48, a recent graduate from the University of Kansas, had been arrested for underage drinking (paying a $450 fine) and possession of marijuana (paying $350 on top of serving five days in jail). He thought people with money can “afford better lawyers.” A Romanian immigrant who retained a thick accent, No. 61 believed in this country’s justice system, but expressed confusion about how much the prosecution had to prove. “I’m probably not the smartest guy,” he said, “but I will do what is best and fair.”
The final juror, No. 68, was a rape survivor who assured the court she could set aside her personal trauma and remain impartial. With typical chutzpah, Genson asked Gaughan for an extra peremptory strike. When the judge asked why, Genson said, “Because we’ve run out of them!” Gaughan scowled and denied the request.
The morning the trial began, both Chicago dailies quoted legal experts about the makeup of the jury. “It was amazing how few people knew about it,” prominent defense attorney Terry Ekl said, skeptical of the number of jurors who claimed ignorance of a case that had been big news in Chicago for six years. Noting that the jury represented “a broad spectrum,” Kent College of Law Professor Richard Kling said it gave both sides reasons to be hopeful, but he noted the defense might have reason to worry about the rape victim.
Just before opening statements, Judge Gaughan dismissed the woman who’d been raped, not because of her history, he said, but because her boss wouldn’t pay her during the trial. One of the alternates, No. 66, took her place. The twentysomething man had interned at a radio station, then applied for a job with the Chicago Police Department. His uncle had been convicted on child porn charges, but he swore he could be fair.
Solicitous of the jurors throughout the proceedings, the otherwise stern judge generally spared them his flashes of wrath, frequently asking if they’d slept well in the sequester hotel, or if they enjoyed their state-provided breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
In opening statements on May 20, 2008, both sides presented their versions of what jurors would see when the video was screened in court. “It is Reshona Landfair and Robert Kelly that you will see on this videotape,” Assistant State’s Attorney Shauna Boliker said, her usually chipper trill wavering at times. “You will see the sex acts that he commanded Reshona Landfair to perform, vile and disturbing and disgusting acts. You will see that underage child performing acts that you have never seen before. A child doesn’t choose to be violated and placed on a videotape, a videotape that will live on forever, long after this child becomes an adult. The case is laid out for you, frame by ugly frame. Frame by disgusting frame. You don’t have to put the pieces together, because he already has done that for you.”
A mother of three boys in her late forties, Boliker served as the face of the prosecution. A then–junior attorney, Mary Boland, sat taking notes or handing files to her colleagues; another, Kim Foxx, was overseeing other sex-crime prosecutions, but she occasionally visited the courtroom to observe. Robert Heilingoetter acted as Boliker’s deputy, since he’d gotten that first call to the state’s attorney’s office from Sparkle by chance. “Poor Bob never wanted to be part of that case, but he got pressed into service,” a source told me. Heilingoetter laughed and confirmed that when I asked him. The Kelly trial would be his last before retiring.
Chief of the state’s attorney’s Sex Crimes Division for a decade, Boliker had made headlines a year earlier for prosecuting the Rev. Daniel McCormack. A Catholic herself, the plea bargain she struck landed the priest in jail for five years. (Later, a judge designated McCormack a “sexually violent person,” and he will be held in a state prison for sex offenders indefinitely.) In RedEye, the free tabloid started by the Trib for young commuters, Kyra Kyles described Boliker’s “radiant smile” and “blunt bangs,” suggesting she could be played in a movie by Meg Ryan. “She has one of the grimmer assignments among county prosecutors,” the Trib’s Kayce T. Ataiyero wrote, “yet she is widely regarded as one of the friendliest lawyers in the courthouse.”
Boliker’s voice could sound incongruously cheerful, almost musical, even when discussing the most horrible sex crimes. In Blender, Edward McClelland called her “a high-school homecoming queen who grew up to prosecute pervs and creeps.” The only part of that description with which she disagrees is that “homecoming queen” evokes a party girl, while she had been a nerdy straight-A student from grammar school in her native Gary, Indiana, through DePaul University’s College of Law.
“Robert Kelly is not on that tape!” Sam Adam Jr. bellowed at the start of opening statements for the defense. Although he was the least experienced lawyer on Kelly’s team, his father and Genson wanted to “give the kid his chance,” a source told me, adding that it didn’t hurt that the biracial Adam Jr. was often the only lawyer of color in the courtroom. Displaying a shirtless photo of Kelly taken by Chicago police after they fingerprinted the singer at the Marquette District headquarters in June 2002, Adam Jr. pointed to a caterpillar-shaped mole on Kelly’s back, a stratagem straight out of the O. J. Simpson trial. He tried to channel one of Simpson’s lawyers, Johnnie Cochran, comparing the mole in the photo to what jurors would see in the video. “Either Robert isn’t the man on that tape, or he’s a magician, because there’s no mole!”
That line didn’t quite have the ring of “If it doesn’t fit, you must acquit,” but reporters agreed Adam Jr. made a game attempt. After graduating from Lake Forest Academy in the exclusive North Shore suburbs, he went to the University of Wisconsin’s law school in Madison, but he bragged about working from a basement office behind a battered door and a weather-beaten mailbox on the South Side, “keeping it real.” His voice could be musical, too, but where Boliker sounded like Karen Carpenter, Adam Jr. evoked KRS-One.
Adam Jr.’s opening began a three-pronged defense in which the arguments sometimes conflicted. One, the man on the tape wasn’t Kelly. Two, it was Kelly, but the video was fake, allegedly produced by a shadowy conspiracy of people out to destroy the star, led by Barry Hankerson and including Sparkle and the journalist who received the tape (that is, me). Three, the girl wasn’t who prosecutors said she was. “Reshona Landfair is sweet and nice, a wonderful person. The woman in this tape is a prostitute, paid with money,” Adam Jr. said. He questioned why the twenty-three-year-old woman wouldn’t testify for the state. “She’s right here in the city. Right here on t
he South Side of Chicago. Now why wouldn’t they bring her in? If she’s not here for you to see her, for you to hear her, there’s one reason for that. It’s not her on that tape!”
Actually, there was another reason. If the prosecution won, and it turned out Reshona had perjured herself before the grand jury or in Judge Gaughan’s courtroom, she could wind up behind bars, too, like the girl in Rep. Mel Reynolds’s case. The prosecutors certainly did not want to do that to a young woman they’d seen violated on video, and State’s Attorney Dick Devine wouldn’t want that, either. The bad publicity from the Reynolds case had been a political nightmare for Devine’s predecessor, Jack O’Malley.
Adam Jr. didn’t say why the defense wouldn’t call Reshona to repeat her denial to the grand jury, which five sources told me about, but his bombast often covered his lapses in logic. During a public hearing five months earlier, Judge Gaughan had ruled prosecutors could not call a renowned expert, Dr. Sharon Cooper, to testify that such denials aren’t uncommon for victims of child sexual abuse. Gaughan agreed with the defense: Reshona spoke to the grand jury under oath; she presumably told the truth; the trial would not question her credibility or motives. “It was a significant blow to our case,” a member of the prosecution team told me.
Dr. Cooper, the CEO of North Carolina–based Developmental and Forensic Pediatrics, saw the videotape and spent weeks preparing the testimony she never delivered in 2008. More than a decade later, she told me what she’d been prepared to say on the stand: “Many times, children will deny, because the presence of these images is so shaming. The reason that victims don’t acknowledge that those images are them is because of the guilt, self-blame, and shame. . . . A second part of this is that you don’t know what degree of brainwashing may have occurred for this young person by the offender. Very often, just like in sex-trafficking victims, they are sworn to secrecy. The individual uses love and affection as the piece that makes this child or adolescent become devoted to that individual.”
If Reshona Landfair’s parents were discouraging her from speaking out, that was another big problem, Dr. Cooper said. The media attention would also have been daunting. Finally, “as we see in sex-trafficking cases where images also exist,” Dr. Cooper said, “there’s often a degree of witness-tampering that occurs. I suspected or was concerned that there was some degree of witness tampering that may have happened in this particular case, because the witness was nowhere to be found.” Although she continued to follow the Kelly story, she wasn’t disappointed she never testified, “primarily because Chicago has such a reputation for corruption. And you always worry when you go into a high-profile case like that. You worry about your personal safety.”
In other sealed rulings in closed chambers, my sources said, Gaughan ruled as inadmissible any evidence or testimony that Reshona; her mother, Valerie; and her father, Greg, worked for Kelly and were on his payroll. None of the lawyers Abdon or I spoke to could understand why the prosecution wouldn’t be able to follow the money from Kelly to the Landfairs, or offer testimony on the connections, and why the jury wouldn’t be able to hear about the singer’s history of buying silence from his victims. Greg Landfair played on Kelly’s albums, Valerie worked as an office assistant, and Reshona, who dreamed of stardom as a singer, sometimes babysat for the star, our sources said. Again, the Landfairs have never spoken.
After opening arguments and a break for lunch, the trial reconvened at about 1 p.m. on May 20. Sheriff’s deputies dimmed the lights and drew the blinds as a technical assistant wheeled a six-foot projection screen worthy of a sports bar in front of the jury box. A smaller TV faced the spectators. Judge Gaughan’s assistant and de facto publicist, Terry Sullivan, warned courtroom artists not to sketch what they saw. “Anyone who draws a depiction or a simulation can be committing the act of child pornography,” he said, “and you don’t want to do that.” Tense with anticipation, everyone watched as the tech hit PLAY. And nothing happened.
Only after tinkering with the wires for a few minutes did the twenty-six-minute, thirty-nine-second video begin to screen, and not for the last time. Sun-Times reporter Eric Herman told me the video eventually would be shown in its entirety or in part more times than he could count.
During the first viewing, the jurors stared intently, some taking notes, and others resting their heads on their hands. One of the male jurors broke into a nervous smile, and another busily chewed gum. An older female juror pinched the bridge of her nose, while the Baptist minister’s wife kept her hand over her mouth. In the gallery, Kelly’s entourage filled most of two rows, all men, and all attired in seemingly expensive suits. They kept their eyes downcast. Two dozen reporters covering the opening day took notes, documenting the action onscreen, minute by minute. An older male spectator clenched his arms tight, his bald dome turning red, while a young woman crossed her legs, her face registering disgust. Abdon, who’d “popped in,” said he’d forgotten the impact of seeing the video for the first time, but it registered on everyone in court.
The reporters all agreed about what Kelly wore that day—a dark pinstripe suit and a blue tie with diagonal orange stripes—but they differed wildly when describing his reaction. He was (choose one) bored; sad; appalled; concerned. Chin in hand, he tilted his braided head, looking from different angles. Occasionally, he whispered to his lawyers.
The prosecution followed the video with its first witness, Detective Dan Everett of the Youth Division of the Special Investigations Unit. He had since retired, but he testified that he obtained the tape in February 2002 from a Chicago Sun-Times reporter. He did not know where the reporter got it. Prosecutor Robert Heilingoetter asked Everett if he recognized the girl on the tape, and the detective said he did, from a previous investigation.
Chiseled, square-jawed and the epitome of a veteran law-and-order man—very much like Everett himself—Heilingoetter had neglected to tell the detective that the judge ruled witnesses for the state could not mention the years-long police investigation into Kelly’s allegedly predatory behavior. Judge Gaughan sent the jury out of the room, then erupted. “If you do it again, I certainly am going to grant a mistrial!” he roared at Everett, rocking so hard in his chair, it seemed as if he might fall out of it. “It’s an egregious mistake!”
When the jury returned, a crimson-faced Everett said he’d been “mistaken” in characterizing “an interview” as “an investigation.” The significance of what happened with Everett struck every journalist in the courtroom. In Slate, Josh Levin wrote that “the facts of this particular case don’t come close to speaking to the nature and magnitude of Kelly’s alleged crimes. On the basis of today’s proceedings, Judge Vincent Gaughan seems to have ruled that none of them is fair game.”
The rest of the case Gaughan allowed prosecutors to present unfolded over six more days, though the proceedings stalled several times for squabbles out of the presence of the jury. Whether other witnesses had been ruled out by Gaughan, or Boliker’s team didn’t want to bore the jury with repetitious testimony, the fifteen called by the state represented a fraction of the fifty we heard testified before the grand jury. The state called fourteen people after Detective Everett, including a woman who said she’d engaged in videotaped threesomes with Kelly and Reshona, four of Reshona’s relatives, six of her friends and their parents, her high-school basketball coach (a former cop who had since become Oak Park’s school board president), and three photo and video experts.
Twenty-four-year-old hair-stylist Simha “Punky” Jamison gave the most convincing testimony of Reshona’s friends, corroborated by Peter Thomas, who’d been her legal guardian. Jamison and Reshona started hanging out in fourth grade. When Boliker asked if they saw each other every day, Jamison laughed as if to say, “Duh.” Reshona ended the friendship abruptly not long after the singer she called her godfather was indicted.
Jamison said she’d been introduced to Kelly by the Landfair family when she was twelve years old. She and Reshona began spending time with the star at a We
st Side gym, Hoops, watching him play basketball. They also went to Chicago Trax recording studio, and they visited his house on George Street. Sometimes, Jamison went home alone, while Reshona stayed for the night. Jamison said she never saw Kelly touch Reshona inappropriately, but she did see the star give her friend cash, “never less than a hundred, never more than five hundred.” The prosecution also implied that Kelly bought Reshona a PT Cruiser, years before she’d even obtained a driver’s license. These two statements made it into the record despite Judge Gaughan’s rulings that any possible payments to the Landfairs for their silence were inadmissible.
Reshona never discussed having a sexual relationship with Kelly, her friend Jamison said. “There were things I wouldn’t tell her, as I’m sure there were things that she wouldn’t tell me.” She testified that she saw the tape twice, once when friends showed it at Oak Park and River Forest High School—she didn’t specify exactly how or where that happened—and again in court. She had immediately recognized Kelly and her best friend during the first viewing. “I know her like the back of my hand,” she said, adding that she cried herself to sleep that night. Based on her hair style, a mullet cut they once shared, Jamison believed Reshona appeared in the video at age fourteen.
During cross-examination, Adam Jr. tried to make a point about Jamison relying only on her friend’s hair style to identify her. “You can’t tell by looking at a person’s vagina how old they are, can you?” Sensing how poorly that bizarre question played, he moved on to part two of the three-pronged defense, the fake tape. He asked Jamison if she’d seen a “Waymon [sic] Brothers” movie called Little Man. “They took the head of Marlon Waymons [sic] and put it on a midget, and it looked real, didn’t it?” Jamison looked at him like he was nuts. “Not really,” she said, drawing out the last word, and jurors and spectators laughed.
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