R. Kelly’s has filed suit against the federal Bureau of Prisons for allegedly leaking his prison emails and call logs to blogger Tasha K.
According to Billboard, the embattled singer filed the lawsuit in Chicago federal court on Monday (November 13), alleging a Bureau of Prisons agent illegally accessed his digital prison records and sold them to Tasha in 2019.
Tasha K is named as a defendant in the suit, with Kelly’s legal team writing that she “rallied her massive following to harass the plaintiff with the use of the stolen information and created chaos in plaintiff’s personal life.”
The leaks left Kelly “isolated and fearful to communicate with his attorneys or other third parties” because he knew it could be “released to the general public for mass exploitation.”
The lawsuit notes that an internal BOP investigation revealed that an unnamed officer had pulled R. Kelly’s records from the agency’s digital database of information on prisoners, scanned them, then emailed them to outside parties – including Tasha – and that nothing happened once that was discovered.
“No charges were brought against defendant BOP Officer A, and the government has refused to reveal any details about the investigation including the identity of Officer A,” the complaint reads. “In short, there has been a cover-up of the rampant BOP misconduct that is ongoing.”
They also noted that the leaks have continued to happen since the investigation – pointing to an incident over the summer where the $28,000 he had in his prison canteen was discovered and subsequently seized to continue paying restitution to his victims.
R. Kelly’s lawyers allege that the leaks amounted to “negligence, an invasion of his privacy, an intentional infliction of emotional distress, civil theft and civil conspiracy.”
A spokesperson for the BOP declined to comment to Billboard, citing agency policy on pending litigation.
In March, the Illinois Supreme Court ruled Heather Williams was entitled to access the disgraced singer’s label fund — which was reportedly valued at $1.5 million in 2020, according to Billboard — before Midwest Commercial Funding, a property manager that won its own separate $3.5 million ruling against Kelly over unpaid rent on a Chicago studio.
Williams won a $4million judgment against Kelly in 2020 after filing a civil lawsuit against him a year prior. She alleged that when she was 16, the “Ignition” hitmaker lured her to his studio on a promise she could be in a music video and then had sex with her multiple times as a minor.
The state high court’s decision on Thursday upheld an earlier ruling by a lower court that Williams — and not Midwest Commercial — should be given priority to access the royalties because she was the first to properly file a demand for the money.
R. Kelly was sentenced to two decades behind bars in February by a Chicago judge for his federal sexual assault case.
At the sentencing, the judge ruled that all but one year would be served concurrent to the 30-year sentence he’s currently serving in New York after being found guilty of racketeering and sex trafficking.
A grand jury ultimately found the Chicago native guilty on six of the 13 federal charges which included three child pornography charges for sexually abusing four girls — three of whom were minors.
They also found Kelly guilty of making three videos of himself sexually assaulting his 14-year-old goddaughter, which resulted in another three charges for producing sex tapes with a minor.
The ruling came shortly after a series of pending sex abuse charges against R. Kelly in Cook County, Illinois were dropped. The singer was indicted in 2019 on 10 counts of aggravated criminal sexual abuse involving four alleged victims, three of whom were under the age of consent.