MANHATTAN (CN) — Six women who appeared in the docuseries “Surviving R. Kelly” are trying to retrieve more than $9 million owed to them in a civil judgment against Kelly, who was ruled liable for terroristic threats made against the women in the leadup to the series premiere, according to new court filings Friday.
Kelly, his former manager Donnell Russell and Universal Music were ordered to pay a total of more than $10 million in 2023 after a New York judge ruled that they were behind a false mass shooting threat that led to a December 2018 public premier of the documentary being cancelled.
“This false mass shooting threat successfully led to the emergency evacuation of everyone, including the plaintiffs, awakening and exacerbating old wounds in the abuse survivors, and causing all the plaintiffs even greater trauma,” New York Supreme Court Justice Richard Latin wrote in a bench ruling, awarding damages to the six women.
The empty shooting threat was the climax in what was a monthslong campaign from Kelly to pressure the six women and the networks behind “Surviving R. Kelly” to pull the plug on the series, Latin said in the judgment.
But that judgment has gone mostly unpaid, according to a turnover petition filed Friday in New York County Supreme Court by the six women. As it stands, Kelly still owes the women more than $9.9 million plus interest, which accrues at a rate of approximately $2,450.30 per day, according to the petition.
The women claim that the only chunk of the judgment that has been paid so far is roughly $200,000 that was recovered from Universal Music Publishing, Inc. That money was supposedly royalties that Universal owed Kelly, pursuant to a co-publishing agreement.
Kelly, who is currently serving a 30-year prison sentence for racketeering and sex trafficking, was behind bars when Latin entered the $10 million judgment against him and his co-defendants in 2023. The following year, he claimed that he never knew about the lawsuit at all until his side had lost and denied that Donnell was ever his manager, as the suit had suggested.
In 2022, Donnell was sentenced to a year in federal prison for the shooting threat. But the punishment didn’t add time to the sentence he was already due to serve for another effort to quash sexual abuse claims against Kelly.
Kelly’s sexual abuse accusations date back decades. In 1996, he was sued by his first public accuser: Tiffany Hawkins, who claimed that Kelly had sex with her starting in 1991 when she was 15 and he was 24. Hawkins also claimed that Kelly had encouraged her to entice her friends, who were also underage, into sleeping with him.
In 2002, Kelly was prosecuted on child pornography charges after authorities said he made a sex tape with an underage girl that was sold by bootleggers throughout the country. Those charges led to a controversial trial that ended with Kelly being acquitted on all charges in 2008.
The 2019 docuseries “Surviving R. Kelly” looked back at Kelly’s accusations of sexual misconduct with minors. After it aired, Kelly was dropped by his record label and investigated in new probes that led to a pair of convictions — one in 2021 for racketeering and violations of the Mann Act and one in 2022 for child pornography charges.