Singer R. Kelly moved to prison in North Carolina to serve 30-year sentence
Disgraced R&B singer R. Kelly was moved to Granville County last week to serve his prison sentence for child sex crimes and other offenses, according to the Federal Bureau of Prisons.
The 56-year-old recording artist, whose legal name is Robert Sylvester Kelly, is being held in Federal Correctional Institution Butner Medium I, according to the prison website.
The Butner federal correctional institutions, which include medium- and low-security prisons and a federal medical center, are located about 15 miles north of downtown Durham.
Kelly was sentenced in June 2022 in a New York federal court to serve 30 years in prison for sexual exploitation of children, among other crimes. In February, a federal judge in Chicago sentenced Kelly to serve 20 years in prison for child pornography charges with one year to run consecutive to the 30-year sentence.
In 2021, he was convicted after a six-week trial on charges of “racketeering predicated on criminal conduct including sexual exploitation of children, forced labor and Mann Act violations involving the coercion and transportation of women and girls in interstate commerce to engage in illegal sexual activity,” according to the federal U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency.
Kelly, who was first arrested in February 2019 on several sex abuse charges, is expected to remain incarcerated until he is in his late 80s, NPR reported.
The Lifetime television documentary series “Surviving R. Kelly” detailed the allegations against Kelly across three seasons in 2019, 2020 and 2023.
Kelly has denied any wrongdoing and plans to appeal his conviction, media outlets reported.
He was transferred from the Metropolitan Correctional Center in Chicago to FCI Butner Med I on Wednesday.
Noteworthy inmates at Butner include Joe Exotic of ‘Tiger King,’ Bernie Madoff
Butner’s prisons have housed several famous criminals and controversial celebrities, including:
▪ Joseph Maldonado-Passage, known as “Joe Exotic,” who starred in the 2020 Netflix documentary series “Tiger King: Murder, Mayhem and Madness,” is in the Butner Federal Medical Center. He was moved there in 2021 for cancer treatment.
The 60-year-old has since moved to a federal prison in Fort Worth, Texas, and is set to be released in 2035, prison records show.
▪ Theodore “Ted” Kaczynski, known as the “Unabomber,” was transferred to Butner in 2021 from Colorado, The Washington Post reported. He is serving multiple life-in-prison sentences after killed three people in mail bombings, and injuring others. He pleaded guilty to the crimes in 1998. He is now 80 years old.
▪ Bernie Madoff, one of the most notorious Ponzi schemers in history, died at the medical center at age 82 in 2021. Madoff swindled investors out of billions of dollars and was sentenced in 2009 to 150 years in prison.
▪ Samuel Israel III, a former hedge fund manager, was sentenced to 22 years in prison for running a $450 million fraud from 1996 to 2005, according to Reuters. Israel, 63, is housed in Butner’s low security prison and is scheduled for release in May 2026, according to prison records.
▪ Al Parish is a former Charleston Southern University economist in South Carolina convicted for running a Ponzi investment scheme.
Parish, 63, was previously sentenced to 24 years behind bars in 2008 and ordered to forfeit $63 million, South Carolina news station WCVI reported.
Parish was released from prison in March 2021 after meeting the conditions to be granted compassionate release, according to WCVI.
Parish was known for his “flashy clothes” and a luxury pen collection worth $1.2 million, NBC News reported.
▪ Russian computer hacker Roman Velerevich Seleznev was sentenced to 14 years in prison in 2017 for his involvement in a $50 million cyberfraud ring and for defrauding banks of $9 million through a hacking scheme, according to the U.S. Department of Justice.
▪ Gilberto Rodriguez-Orejuela, called “one of the world’s most infamous drug lords,” by the Miami Herald, ran a family drug cartel in Colombia that trafficked roughly 200 tons of cocaine to the U.S. He died at 83 in Butner’s medical facility in 2022, according to Colombian newspaper El Tiempo.
