A United States judge has ruled that Universal Music Group must provide singer R. Kelly’s sexual assault victims access to his royalties, which total more than $500,000.
US District Judge Ann Donnelly,in Brooklyn, New York, signed an order on Wednesday directing Universal Music Group to turn over the money to satisfy unpaid restitution and fines that the singer still owed.
Donnelly had earlier ordered Kelly to surrender almost $28,000 in his prison inmate account and apply it to his unpaid fines.
The judge fined Kelly in 2022 when she sentenced the R&B artist to 30 years in prison for racketeering and sexual exploitation of minors.
He received a 20-year sentence after being found guilty in a different federal child pornography case in Chicago; the majority of those years will run concurrently with the Brooklyn sentence.
Kelly is currently in a federal prison in Butner, North Carolina. It’s not clear whether he has a lawyer representing him.
Kelly’s attorneys expressed displeasure last year that federal prosecutors had taken the “unprecedented” action of taking the singer’s prison prisoner account, claiming they had been unable to establish Kelly’s failure to make payments in full to his victims in the form of penalties and reparations.
The judge later rejected their argument that prosecutors acted prematurely when they’d frozen all but $500 in Kelly’s prison inmate account.
