While R. Kelly languishes in prison preparing to appeal his conviction for a variety of sex crimes, the men and women who helped him get away with those crimes for over two decades are facing consequences of their own. According to Rolling Stone, Donnell Russell, who describes himself as Kelly’s manager, was sentenced to 20 months in prison in a hearing on Thursday, November 17 for stalking and harassing one of the singer’s victims in an effort to get her to change her testimony against him.
Russell had previously pled guilty to those charges in July, after also being convicted of making terroristic threats against a screening of Lifetime’s Surviving R. Kelly series. According to the Department of Justice, Russell sent emails and text messages and made phone calls threatening the anonymous victim with explicit photos of her unless she withdrew her complaint against R. Kelly. “Pull the plug or you will be exposed,” he wrote in one text. He later posted those photos on a Facebook page as Surviving R. Kelly aired.
Meanwhile, another associate of R. Kelly, Michael Williams, was sentenced last year to eight years in prison for arson and witness intimidation after setting another woman’s car on fire. Kelly himself was found guilty on charges of child porn in a second trial in Chicago after previously being convicted of sex trafficking in New York last year.