R Kelly Attorneys Spar With Alleged 'Fixer' Over Testimony

On Tuesday, Charles Freeman told a wild tale to jurors about how R. Kelly and his associates agreed to pay him up to a million dollars in the early 2000s to hunt down video of the R&B singer sexually assaulting a young teen girl.

But, The Chicago Tribune reports that account came under withering scrutiny during nearly five hours of cross-examination Wednesday, with attorneys for Kelly and his co-defendants trying to paint Freeman as a liar and opportunist who has given inconsistent accounts about the conspiracy over the years.

“People who lie, people who cheat, people who take advantage of others for money, those are people whose word is hard to trust, agreed?” attorney Beau Brindley, who represents Kelly’s former business manager, Derrel McDavid, asked pointedly at the outset of his questioning, his hands folded in front of him.

“Agreed,” Freeman said.

That was about as polite as it got, according to The Trib.

Brindley grew louder and more animated as the questioning continued — pointing his finger in the air, placing his hands on his hips.

Later, Kelly’s attorney, Jennifer Bonjean, was alternately sarcastic and exasperated in her questioning, interrupting Freeman when he wasn’t answering directly and even slapping the lectern after an objection by prosecutors, saying, “I would like to do a cross-examination! Do I not get to do that?”

For most of his time on the witness stand, Freeman kept a smile on his face. Occasionally he would chuckle, lean back and take a sip of iced tea. As it stretched into the afternoon, however, he began rubbing his eyes and jabbing back at the defense, at one point telling Bonjean that it was her own client who’d hired him “because he knew I could get the job done.”

“Just like he hired you to get the job done here,” Freeman said.

“Well I don’t break the law to get the job done,” Bonjean shot back.

Freeman, who was colorful and loose on direct examination on Tuesday, is a key witness to the heart of the indictment alleging there was a conspiracy to cover up sexual misconduct by Kelly.

The plot as described by Freeman on Tuesday spanned almost a decade, and unfolded in cities from Chicago to Kansas City and Atlanta, at Kelly’s music studio, concert venues and even the singer’s sprawling Olympia Fields mansion, where Freeman said he was told to strip naked and get in a pool to prove he wasn’t wearing a wire.

Freeman testified Tuesday that he was paid hundreds of thousands of dollars over the years in exchange for getting at least one of those incriminating tapes back. In one of his more memorable statements, he said he did not tell the police about the child pornography he’d recovered “because the police wasn’t going to pay me a million dollars.”

In the morning session Wednesday, Brindley hammered Freeman about the motivations behind his purported search for R. Kelly tapes, suggesting at one point that it was Freeman himself who had “tried to shake down or extort Mr. Kelly for money.”

Kelly, 55, is charged with 13 counts of production of child pornography, conspiracy to produce child pornography and conspiracy to obstruct justice.