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Chicago: Prosecutors played the sex tape at the centre of R. Kelly's child pornography trial in open court on Tuesday, just hours after opening statements in which they accused the R&B singer of appearing in the footage with an underage girl.
The jurors, who had been taking feverish notes during opening statements, sat motionless while the video played. Their eyes were fixed on a 4-by-4-foot monitor just outside the jurors' box.
A grim-looking Kelly, 41, appeared to watch the entire footage intently on a small monitor on the defense table. He occasionally rocked in his chair and rested his chin in his hand.
The 27-minute homemade video shows a man having sex with a young female, who is naked for most of the recording except for a necklace with a cross dangling from it.
At the start of the videotape, the man hands the female money and she mouths the words, "Thank you." She is often blank-faced, impassive. The man speaks to the female in a hushed, monotone voice, and she calls him "Daddy."
Prosecutors say the man in the video is Kelly, and that the female is a girl who was as young as 13 when the tape was made between January 1, 1998, and November 1, 2000.
The singer, who has pleaded not guilty, faces up to 15 years if convicted.
During opening statements in the long-delayed trial, Cook County prosecutor Shauna Boliker warned jurors they would have to watch a videotape depicting an "underage child performing sex acts that you have never seen before."
Defence attorneys, however, told jurors in their opening statements that Kelly is not the man on the tape and called the video's origins into question. The defence also told jurors that the girl who authorities allege is depicted on the tape is not her at all.
That's a claim that's also been made by the 23-year-old woman prosecutors say was a minor at the time of the taping. She denies she's the girl on the video.
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