Lisa Van Allen, 27, chronicled her first meeting with Kelly in Georgia when she was 17 years old, to her last group sex encounter with him and the alleged victim in 2000 on the set of a music video filming in Chicago.
While trying to secure a spot in Kelly’s “Home Alone” video in 1997, Van Allen met with him in his trailer on the video set, as arranged by Kelly, she said. They talked briefly and then had “intercourse.” Kelly then asked Van Allen if her mother would mind if she came to Chicago. The then 17-year-old said no and they exchanged phone numbers.
A short time later, she would spend weekends in Chicago, often in hotel rooms paid for by Kelly, or at a music studio that he partly owned. She soon quit her job in Atlanta because of too many “missed flights” and came back to Chicago. Kelly did not ask her to move to Chicago, she “just never left,” said Van Allen, who is now pregnant with her second child. “I traveled with him. We went to the mall, movies. I went on tour with him,” she said.
Van Allen appears in the I Wish video as the woman braiding Kelly’s hair, and had a role in a 1998 tour with Kelly. He would pick her out of the audience at the end of each show and they would have simulated sex. Also in 1998, Van Allen met the alleged victim, whom she was told by Kelly was 16 years old. They had three-way sex in the Grammy-winning artist’s home on West George street.
The encounter was videotaped by Kelly and took place in a lower-level room set up like a log cabin, she told the jury. About a year later, the trio again had group sex%uFFFDalso videotaped%uFFFDon a futon mattress on the singer’s indoor basketball court, she said.
Wiping tears from her eyes, Van Allen struggled to detail the second sex tryst on the basketball court, and paused for at least three minutes before testifying that she also cried the day the video camera was set up to record the sex act between her, Kelly and the alleged victim. “I didn’t want to do it. He got upset. He said he couldn’t watch that. He couldn’t do anything with me crying,” she said, blotting her eyes and nose with tissue.
An angry Kelly stopped the production of the homemade sex tape and put it in a duffle bag that he carried everywhere he went. He put all of his sex tapes in the duffle bag, Van Allen said. The final three-way sex tryst happened in 2000 in an on-set trailer during a video shoot in Chicago, Van Allen testified. Someone knocked on the trailer’s door, Kelly had the alleged victim run “into the bathroom naked” so no one would see her, she said.
During Van Allen’s testimony, Kelly often conferred with his attorneys. He also shook his head several times, rested his chin in his palm and sometimes maintained eye contact with the witness. Van Allen said she saw the videotape of a man and female who appears to be underage having sex for the first time last week in the Cook County State’s Attorney’s office when she was originally scheduled to testify.
When asked to identify the participants in the video, she said “it was Robert” and it “looked identical to (alleged victim).” “Her body, her face, her breasts. Everything from his face, to his bald head, his genitals, back, everything,” Van Allen said, referring to how she identified the people in the video. Kelly, 41, is charged with 14 counts of child pornography for allegedly filming himself and a minor%uFFFDbetween 1998 and 2000%uFFFD having sex.
He and the alleged victim denied being in the video. The Chicago native faces up to 15 years in prison if convicted. Prosecutors asked why she finally came forward with the information. Van Allen said it was “the right thing to do.” The defense painted Van Allen as a woman with a penchant for men with fraud convictions and took part of a scheme to extort money from Kelly. Sam Adam Sr. asked that if it was “the right thing to do,” why she had not gone to the authorities when Kelly was indicted in 2002.
“I was young then,” she responded. Not satisfied, Adam asked why she didn’t step up each subsequent year, since she was older. “So the spirit didn’t move you to do the right thing, this, until today?” Adam shouted. During that time she was pregnant and just wasn’t ready to get involved, she said.
Adam, calling the woman a thief, suggested the real motive was to get money from Kelly, because she approached Kelly about a tape she had with him, her and the alleged victim having sex. Van Allen admitted that she took a tape from his duffle bag without Kelly knowing, and also took a $20,000 Rolex watch from his Georgia hotel room on a separate occasion. She did not tell prosecutors about the theft of the watch until Monday, shortly before she took the witness stand. She was granted immunity for her testimony.
In March 2007, she called Kelly about the sex tape she took and said it was not in her possession, an associate of hers in Kansas City, Keith Murrell, had it. She offered to arrange for its retrieval. Kelly offered $250,000 for the tape, she said. “He tried to offer me money. I did not extort him,” Van Allen testified. Van Allen, her fiancΘ, Yul Brown, and Murrell flew to Chicago to exchange the tape and the payment, she said.
Once Kelly’s business manager, Derrel McDavid, saw the video and verified it to be legitimate, she and Murrell were paid $20,000 each in cash. Kelly said the remainder of the $250,000 would be paid upon receipt of the original tape, Van Allen said. “Lisa Van Allen is an admitted thief and liar who wouldn’t know the truth if she tripped over it. If there was any crime committed here, it was her attempt to extort money from R. Kelly,” McDavid said in a statement. Adam again accused Van Allen and Brown of cooking up a “scheme” to get money from Kelly, as alleged by Van Allen’s former boyfriend, Damon Pryor.
Pryor popped up as a surprise potential witness for the defense last week, stalling Van Allen’s testimony. He is the father of her 5-year-old daughter and was convicted of identity theft. Pryor served time in federal prison for bank fraud. Brown also has a federal fraud conviction. “Do you have something that they have to have federal conviction for fraud before you’re interested in them?” Adam asked Van Allen.
With a haughty smirk and chuckle, she laughed in response to his question. Part of the scheme was bribe Kelly out of “millions” and for Brown to get assistance with his own legal woes in Georgia, Adam said. Cook County prosecutors were contacted several times in March by Brown after he was recently charged in Georgia with having a loaded AK-47 and drugs in the couple’s home. He pled guilty and received probation, instead of the 22 years in prison he faced, Adam said, implying that prosecutors helped Brown.
Brown and Van Allen also met with a member of Kelly’s defense team in Georgia on May 10, one day after the trial began. Sam Adam Jr. was told by Brown at that meeting that Van Allen was offered a $350,000 book deal to detail her relationship with Kelly, and that Kelly had “three opportunities to rectify this situation,” the defense said.
Adam Sr. repeated Van Allen’s earlier contention about wanting to do the right thing and money wasn’t a factor. “It’s about money, isn’t it?” he asked.
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