UMG Ordered to Pay $507K In Royalties to R. Kelly Victims

Universal Music Group has been ordered to pay up on behalf of disgraced R&B singer-songwriter R. Kelly. Reports have surfaced that on Wednesday (August 23) U.S. District Judge Ann Donnelly in Brooklyn, New York signed off on an order for UMG to fulfill unpaid restitution fees that Kelly has acquired. The fines were imposed in 2022, when Donnelly ordered Kelly to 30 years in prison for sexual exploitation of minors and racketeering.

In total, UMG must pay $506,950.26, and the music corporation is said to have $567,444.19 of Kelly’s royalties. Donelly also previously ordered the 56-year-old to defer $28,000 from his prison inmate account to apply towards unpaid fines. In addition, the singer was convicted in a separate child pornography case in Chicago and sentenced to 20 years. The sentence will run concurrently to Kelly’s current 30-year term, which he’s serving at a federal prison in Butler, North Carolina.

Last September, Donnelly addressed Kelly in a Brooklyn courtroom during his sentencing, saying that the artist created “a trail of broken lives.” “These crimes were calculated and carefully planned and regularly executed for almost 25 years,” she said. “You taught them that love is enslavement and violence.”

Although Kelly’s back catalog generates funding from the singer’s longtime fans, Kelly hasn’t released an album since his 2016 holiday LP 12 Nights of Christmas. Last December, a mysterious 13-track project from Kelly leaked, titled I Admit, which included material that the artist released months prior.

While DSPs signaled the project’s release through Sony Music’s catalog division, Legacy Recordings, Kelly was dropped from Sony and RCA in 2020. The move came after Lifetime docu series Surviving R. Kelly began in 2019. Its third and final season premiered in January.