R. Kelly lost a $10.5 million lawsuit stemming from his attempt to stop a Surviving R. Kelly screening years back – but the singer says he never even knew about the suit to be able to fight it.
As previously reported, six women sued both Kelly and his former manager, Donnell Russell, for making terroristic threats to shut down the documentary screening back in September 2018. In August of last year, the women won the suit for a joint total of $10.5million.
But according to documents obtained by TMZ on Monday (January 15), R. Kelly said he’s been sued so many times as of late that it’s nearly impossible to keep up with everything – especially from behind bars. He also claims he’s since changed legal teams and that the suit must have fallen through the cracks in the changeover.
In addition, he added that he wouldn’t have been able to understand the lawsuit even if he did get it – as he still has not yet learned to read “or understand words beyond that of a grade schooler.”
But either way, R. Kelly adds that he’s innocent and that Donnell was not his manager and he acted on his own to shut the screening down.
“He did that for his own reasons,” the embattled singer wrote in the document.
In other news, R. Kelly recently filed suit against the federal Bureau of Prisons for allegedly leaking his prison emails and call logs to blogger Tasha K.
According to Billboard, he filed the lawsuit in Chicago federal court on November 13, alleging a Bureau of Prisons agent illegally accessed his digital prison records and sold them to Tasha in 2019.
Tasha K is named as a defendant in the suit, with Kelly’s legal team writing that she “rallied her massive following to harass the plaintiff with the use of the stolen information and created chaos in plaintiff’s personal life.”
The leaks left Kelly “isolated and fearful to communicate with his attorneys or other third parties” because he knew it could be “released to the general public for mass exploitation.”
The lawsuit notes that an internal BOP investigation revealed that an unnamed officer had pulled R. Kelly’s records from the agency’s digital database of information on prisoners, scanned them, then emailed them to outside parties – including Tasha – and that nothing happened once that was discovered.
“No charges were brought against defendant BOP Officer A, and the government has refused to reveal any details about the investigation including the identity of Officer A,” the complaint reads. “In short, there has been a cover-up of the rampant BOP misconduct that is ongoing.”
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They also noted that the leaks have continued to happen since the investigation – pointing to an incident over the summer where the $28,000 he had in his prison canteen was discovered and subsequently seized to continue paying restitution to his victims.
R. Kelly’s lawyers allege that the leaks amounted to “negligence, an invasion of his privacy, an intentional infliction of emotional distress, civil theft and civil conspiracy.”
A spokesperson for the BOP declined to comment to Billboard, citing agency policy on pending litigation.
