R. Kelly Sex Tape Trial: The Mole

The keystone of R. Kelly’s defense just crumbled.

It’s a small mole on his lower back, the size and shape of a crushed housefly. During opening arguments, attorney Sam Adam Jr. showed the jury a photo of a shirtless Kelly, taken at a police station the day of his arrest. The mole was clearly visible.

“There’s a section of this tape where the man stands up and his back is illuminated,” Adam declared. “There is no mole. That means one thing. It is not Robert, or he’s some kind of magician.”

On Thursday, a forensic video expert played a digitized version of the tape. At the 18-minute mark, Kelly stood up, turned around and dropped his pants. The expert, Grant Fredericks, pointed his cursor at Kelly’s lower back. There was the mole.

“There’s a dark area above the spine and above the waistband a number of inches,” Fredericks pointed out. “There is a mark on the man’s back in the exact same position that is the mark on the man’s back in the [arrest] photo.”

Oops.

Kelly’s lawyers looked grim, like four men who knew the jig was up. On further questioning, Fredericks also demolished Kelly’s Little Man defense, dismissing the possibility that Kelly’s head was morphed onto another man’s body. The 26-minute tape consists of 96,000 images. Morphing a single frame would take an expert four hours, Fredericks said. Therefore, doctoring the entire tape would consume “44 years, working 24/7.” And even then it would look fake.

“Technology today couldn’t do that,” Fredericks said. “Not without detection.”

So that must mean Kelly’s a magician. He’d better be an escape artist, like Criss Angel, because the question in this trial is looking less like “guilty or not guilty?” and more like “Stateville, Dixon or Big Muddy?” — three of Illinois’ baddest prisons.