Live Updates: R. Kelly Found Guilty of All Counts and Faces Life in Prison

Fifty witnesses took the stand over the course of R. Kelly’s six-week trial, but the foundation of the racketeering and sex trafficking case against him was based on his encounters with six women.

Believing she was pregnant with his child, Mr. Kelly, who was 27 at the time, illegally married the singer Aaliyah, 15, in a 10-minute ceremony in a Sheraton hotel room in the Chicago area in 1994. They wore matching jogging suits, each with one pant leg hiked to the knee. Mr. Kelly had been having sex with Aaliyah since she was 13 or 14, according to court testimony. One witness suggested he married her solely so that if she were pregnant, she would be able to obtain an abortion, which she otherwise could not have gotten without parental concent. Aaliyah died in a plane crash in 2001.

A woman who testified as Stephanie said that she approached Mr. Kelly at a Nike store in 1999, when she was 17, to ask him for an audition for a friend, an aspiring singer. The superstar agreed — in return for sexual favors, she said. The next six months were “the lowest time of my life,” Stephanie told the jury, marking the first time she had spoken publicly about being sexually abused by the singer when she was underage.

A woman who testified under the name Sonja said she was a 22-year-old radio intern when she met Mr. Kelly outside a mall in Salt Lake City, and he invited her to come to Chicago for an interview in 2003. But when she arrived, she said, Mr. Kelly locked her in a room in his studio for days, letting her out only for escorted visits to the bathroom. After days without food, she said, she was brought something to eat. But after several bites, she began feeling drowsy, she said, and she later woke up to find Mr. Kelly pulling up his pants and her underwear draped over the couch.

Jerhonda Pace took the stand on the first two days of the trial, becoming the first accuser to ever testify against Mr. Kelly. She told the jury that Mr. Kelly had sex with her in 2009, when she was 16 and he was 42. Ms. Pace is one of several women who said the singer knowingly gave her herpes. Years later, she spoke out against the singer on YouTube. She was also featured in the Lifetime documentary “Surviving R. Kelly” in 2019.

This witness offered some of the most disturbing testimony of the trial. Until recently, prosecutors said, she was still in the singer’s clutches, and she gave a television interview defending him in 2019. But on the stand, the woman, now 22, said that over the course of nearly five years beginning when she was 17, Mr. Kelly coerced her to have sex with a man she did not know while he watched, beat her with a sneaker, forced her to get an abortion and knowingly gave her herpes.

A woman named Faith said she was 19 when she began having sex with Mr. Kelly, then 50, in 2017. On one occasion, Mr. Kelly brought her into a room with a gun, grabbed her neck and directed her to perform a sex act on him. And a short time after another sexual encounter, she was diagnosed with herpes. Faith said Mr. Kelly never told her he had the incurable disease.