A man who said he was cleaning out an old videotape collection found what he thought was a recording of R&B singer R. Kelly in concert, but instead turned out to show a man who appeared to be Kelly sexually abusing girls, he and his attorney said Sunday.
The man then turned the tape over to law enforcement, according to attorney Gloria Allred. She and her client, Gary Dennis, would not discuss the specifics of the tape during a news conference in New York. But Allred said it appears to show a separate incident from the 10 counts of aggravated sexual abuse that Kelly faces in Chicago, though she acknowledged she could not be “100 percent certain” that the man in the tape is Kelly.
Steve Greenberg, an attorney for Kelly, noted that lack of certainty.
“It is not him,” Greenberg said. He also said that Kelly “denies that he is on any tape with underaged girls.”
Dennis, an assistant at a nursing home, said he was cleaning out a box of old VHS tapes in his Pennsylvania home recently when he found the footage, on a tape that was labeled with Kelly’s name. Dennis said he has never met Kelly and doesn’t know how the tape came to be in his possession. He said that because the tape also has a sports game on it, he believes it may have come from a friend.