Testimony expected to continue Thursday in R. Kelly trial

For the first time after two decades of swirling allegations, R. Kelly’s former goddaughter has taken the stand as a prosecution witness in a case against the disgraced singer.

Dressed in a white blazer with her hair in long braids, the woman, now 37 and testifying at Kelly’s federal trial in Chicago under the pseudonym “Jane,” told the jury she had sexual contact with Kelly for the first time at 14.

After testifying calmly for nearly two hours, Jane’s voice grew quieter and began to break as she was asked to describe sexual encounters that Kelly recorded, including the now-infamous tape at the center of Kelly’s 2008 child pornography trial.

One of the videos, which are expected to be played for jurors, showed Jane and Kelly having oral sex in the living room of his Lakeview home, she said. He could be seen giving her champagne and telling her to refer to her genitalia as 14 years old, she said. Then he urinated on her, she said in a voice almost too soft to hear, dabbing tears from her eyes.

On another video from about the same time, Jane testified, filmed in the wood-paneled jacuzzi room in Kelly’s basement, Kelly appeared to hand her money before they have sex.

When a prosecutor asked why he gave her money, Jane started to cry audibly, saying after a long pause: “Because if anybody saw the tape or if it was released for some reason he wanted it to appear as if I was a prostitute.”

As she said it, Jane looked sadly down at the table in front of her. Seated at the defense table across the courtroom, Kelly shook his head.

Their sex acts escalated to intercourse when she was 15, she said. Asked by a prosecutor how she knew her exact age, Jane calmly responded, “Because that’s when I lost my virginity.”

After that, they had sex “innumerable times,” sometimes along with other teenage girls whom Jane recruited at Kelly’s request, she said. The encounters took place in Kelly’s home on West George Street, at his Near West Side recording studio, on tour buses, and in hotels in Chicago and elsewhere, she said.

Two of the other minor victims are also expected to testify against Kelly later in the trial.

To illustrate how young she looked at the time of the encounters, prosecutors had Jane identify two photos of herself from her childhood. The first, taken when she was a sophomore in high school, showed her on one knee holding a basketball, smiling. The other was a headshot from when she was in a music group at 13 — around the time she said she first met Kelly.

Jane and her parents had denied for years that Kelly ever had an inappropriate relationship with her, including to a grand jury in 2002. Jane was not called to testify at Kelly’s 2008 Cook County trial for child pornography, even though county prosecutors alleged she was the girl on the tape.

Federal prosecutors allege Kelly and his associates paid off Jane and her family and covered up other videotapes in order to rig his Cook County trial. He was acquitted on those charges in 2008.

Jane told the jury Thursday that when Chicago police first began investigating her relationship with Kelly in 2000, she denied it because he’d told her he’d be ruined if it came out.

“That was something I would take to my grave,” she said, adding that Kelly told her she “did a good job answering their questions.”

Things escalated in early 2002, however, when her aunt, Stephanie “Sparkle” Edwards, told her “there was a sex tape leaked” depicting Jane and Kelly and that it was going to go public. She said Kelly continued to “stress how important it was to continue to deny it.”

A short time later, Kelly met with Jane and her parents to tell them the truth about their relationship and to apologize and try to keep them on his side, she said. “I just remember my dad storming out,” Jane testified. “He was saying, ‘I can’t help you, I can’t help you.’ … He was hysterical.”

Jane said Kelly decided to sent them to the Bahamas and Cancun so they would not be “accessible” to police and the media.

“There was a lot of negative attention happening around the videotape and Robert wanted us to leave the country to pretty much clear our heads and figure out approaches going forward,” Jane testified.

Earlier in her testimony, Jane told the jury said she was star-struck when she first met Kelly in the 1990s, especially after he attended a performance of her music group and gave her good feedback.

“It made me feel happy that such a successful person was saying I was gifted, so I was excited,” she said.

She began to visit Kelly’s studio regularly when she was 12 or 13, along with her aunt Stephanie “Sparkle” Edwards, a protegee of Kelly’s.

Edwards advised her she should ask Kelly to be her godfather, she testified.

“(She said) I should sit on his lap and rub his head and ask him to play that role in my life,” Jane testified. She did, and Kelly “chuckled a bit, and said yes.”

After that, their relationship…