Convicted singer R. Kelly is suing officers from the Federal Bureau of Prisons and a popular YouTuber for allegedly leaking his personal information.
The lawsuit claims that the prison officers illegally accessed Kelly’s records. He says this includes phone calls, emails and visitor logs – while he was locked up at the federal jail in Chicago.
The suit claims one officer then leaked those records to the Washington Post and to a blogger named “Tasha K.”
Kelly is serving a 31-year sentence in federal prison, following convictions on child pornography, sex trafficking, and racketeering charges in two separate federal trials in Chicago and New York.
Former R&B star R. Kelly, who is serving a decadeslong prison sentence for sex crimes, has sued the federal government over the leak of Kelly’s private information while he was locked up in Chicago’s federal jail.
Kelly attorney Jennifer Bonjean filed the lawsuit Monday in Chicago’s federal court. It alleges that 60 Bureau of Prisons officers improperly accessed Kelly’s records between July 2019 and January 2020.
A federal investigation into the leak went public in September 2021. It did not lead to criminal charges. Kelly’s lawsuit alleges that the conduct continued nearly a year later, when an officer improperly accessed Kelly’s records in August 2022 and leaked information to the Washington Post.
Kelly’s lawsuit targets unidentified officers with the Bureau of Prisons, as well as the blogger known as TashaK.
Kelly is being held at a medium-security prison in Butner, North Carolina, records show. He is serving a 30-year prison sentence for a 2021 racketeering conviction in Brooklyn’s federal court.
Despite that conviction, he also went to trial last year in Chicago, where a jury found him guilty of producing child pornography and enticing minors into criminal sexual activity. U.S. District Judge Harry Leinenweber then gave him a sentence that effectively added one year to Kelly’s earlier prison sentence.
Still, Bonjean wrote in her complaint that the Bureau of Prisons “had a duty to protect [Kelly] and his private and sensitive information.” Instead, she alleged that it “allowed countless BOP officers to access [Kelly’s] confidential information without any legal basis to do so.”
One unknown officer unlawfully downloaded that information and sold it to TashaK, a YouTube blogger with more than 1 million subscribers, according to the lawsuit.
“There has been a cover-up of the rampant BOP misconduct that is ongoing,” and the leak “created chaos in [Kelly’s] personal life,” Bonjean wrote.
