Who is R Kelly’s protection attorney, Nicole Blank Becker? | R Kelly

“The interactions he had with the [accusers] ended up consenting interactions,” Becker informed the jury in her opening statement. “These had been people who realized what they have been obtaining into.”

Pacing in entrance of the jury putting on a darkish pantsuit, her hair pulled back again into a low ponytail, Becker mentioned the accusers are females who grew to become “resentful, angry and even spiteful” just after their interactions with Kelly finished and have taken “advantage” of their problem for media awareness.

As the only girl on Kelly’s 4-person protection crew, Becker has angled herself as the team’s key defense attorney, arguing for the singer’s innocence.

Kelly’s demo kicked off in Brooklyn previously this month immediately after currently being on maintain thanks to pandemic-relevant overall health considerations. The singer faces federal expenses for racketeering and violating the Mann Act, which prohibits the transportation of girls and ladies for the goal of prostitution or debauchery. Kelly has pleaded not responsible on all expenses.

Becker joined Kelly’s defense crew in March 2019, a thirty day period just after Kelly obtained an indictment from Illinois prosecutors. Kelly would be arrested on federal charges and experience individual charges in Minnesota later on that 12 months.

As soon as the head of a sexual intercourse crimes unit at the Macomb county prosecutor’s office exterior of Detroit, in which she labored as a prosecutor considering that 2005, Becker opened her personal private exercise in Michigan and grew to become a defense attorney in 2018 – just a calendar year before she would sign up for Kelly’s protection group.

In the era of #MeToo, Becker has branded herself as a staunch defender of those people who have been accused of sexual abuse. “Being wrongfully accused of sexual assault, rape or any sort of sexual intercourse crimes may perhaps go away you with a ton of questions,” reads Becker’s internet site. “You require a attorney who is not worried to battle on your behalf.”

Becker mentioned beforehand that she made the 180-diploma swap from becoming prosecutor to a defense attorney for sexual intercourse crimes for the reason that the careers “use the correct very same skills”.

“Anyone who is suspected of committing a crime has a proper to have their rights safeguarded,” Becker told the Detroit Absolutely free Push in 2019. “That is what I do, no matter what side I am on.”

Though Becker has said very little publicly about her role on Kelly’s protection staff, she claimed in a 2019 statement that Kelly has been “tried in the media ahead of he will get a demo date”.

“My purpose is to try to provide Kelly’s facet of the tale to the general public and secure his constitutional correct to a good trial,” she claimed.

With two months of the demo down, the staff has produced crystal clear that their technique is to use the age-aged protection that when Kelly’s motion may possibly have been unseemly, they were being not legal.

The accusers who have taken the stand so much have advised identical stories of immediately building sexual interactions with Kelly at a youthful age, succumbing to a series of “rules” like calling Kelly “Daddy” and asking him for permission to consume or use the lavatory. The ladies described actual physical and verbal abuse when Kelly was upset. He also appeared to have an obsession with videotaping his sexual encounters.

Kelly’s attorneys have claimed the interactions with Kelly were consensual, and the women had a option to leave a predicament or simply call the law enforcement.

The technique echoes that of the 2020 trial of Harvey Weinstein, whose defense workforce argued that prosecutors established an “alternative universe” in which “women are not liable for the functions they go to, the gentlemen they flirt with, the options they make to additional their personal careers”.

With the #MeToo movement’s revealing how typically adult males use their energy to abuse girls, it is most likely no coincidence that, like Weinstein’s trial, the head law firm of Kelly’s protection is a lady.

Donna Rotunno, the female who defended Weinstein in his intercourse abuse demo, outlined in a 2018 interview what getting a female in the courtroom usually means for the optics of a sexual intercourse abuse trial.

“I have the capacity to get absent with a great deal much more in a courtroom cross-inspecting a feminine than a male law firm does,” Rotunno advised Chicago journal in 2018. “He may possibly be an superb law firm, but if he goes at that female with the exact same venom I do, he appears to be like a bully. If I do it, nobody even bats an eyelash.”

The method did not pretty perform in Weinstein’s trial, with the previous movie govt remaining sentenced to 23 several years of prison just after a jury located him guilty two counts of sexual assault, but that is not stopping Kelly’s staff from striving to persuade the trial’s jury that the singer’s accusers were “groupies” who sought out Kelly and consented to forming intimate associations with him.

“You selected to choose up every single time he referred to as,” Becker told on Thursday an accuser, who went by the identify “Stephanie” during the demo and reported she experienced a months-lengthy romantic relationship with Kelly in 1999 when she was 17. “You could have selected to get up and leave … You consented to obtaining sexual relations with him each and every time.”

“I felt I did not have a decision,” Stephanie claimed.