Timmy84 said:

Regardless.....open and shut.

Timmy84 said:

Oh shit, the Sun Times finds the prosecutor undermining a celebrity P.I.'s blackmail allegation:

Celebrity P.I. Palladino alleges extortion attempt by Van Allen's fiance

Jack Palladino — a private investigator best known for being hired by Bill Clinton to track down women he'd been linked with — testified Thursday that the fiance of the prosecution's star witness wanted a $300,000 payoff to keep the witness quiet.

The star witness, Lisa Van Allen, testified Monday that she had engaged in threesomes with R. Kelly and the underage girl who allegedly appears in a sex tape with the singer. As part of her testimony, she said she and her fiance, Yul Brown, met with Palladino in March, and that the investigator threatened her.

Palladino said that even before flying to Atlanta for the meeting, "I had a very good idea they would try to extort money... I wanted to give them the opportunity to commit the crime."

According to Palladino, Brown solicited the bribe by mentioning a $300,000 book deal Van Allen potentially had to tell the story of her life with Kelly.

"I didn't believe there was a book deal. The $300,000 was a coded way to get money from my client," Palladino said. The investigator said he unequivocally told Brown that Kelly would not pay them anything.

On cross-examination, prosecutor Bob Heilingoetter noted that neither Brown or Van Allen had ever explicity asked for money.

"I'm trying to figure out where this extortion is, except somewhere between your ears," Heilingoetter said.

But Palladino testified the two repeatedly said they wanted to do what was best for their family and urged the investigator to talk to Kelly.

"There's little doubt about what that meant... It meant, 'I want to take care of them financially'," Palladino said.

Heilingoetter noted Palladino was paid $15,000 for the Atlanta trip. "So for $15,000, you found out that Yul Brown wanted to do what's best for his family. Nice work, detective," Heilingoetter said.

Palladino said he recorded the conversation.
----
You go to the Tribune, you think the defense made their point but the Sun Times has more questions than answers for the guy who supposedly recorded a conversation that Lisa Van Allen wanted $300,000 from Kelly's bank account. If he has tape of this conversation, why didn't the defense present it? Or is he about to do it?

And of all investigators, why would you hire the man who tried to cover up for BILL CLINTON for?

"I did not have sexual relations with that woman..."

Also, I love the way the prosecution is handling this. They don't seem to yell at the defense witnesses, they act sly, yes, but they do it in a way that is like "uh huh... " and then attacks part of what the witnesses say. Expect them to do the same against Damon Pryor.
[Edited 6/5/08 13:04pm]

Headless bodies copulate on screen at R. Kelly trial

Today's testimony started slow in the R. Kelly trial, but things spiced up this afternoon when the jury was shown a video of a headless couple having sex.

Defense expert Charles Palm made the clip from a section of the sex tape at the center of the case, using special effects to illustrate how easy it is to digitally manipulate video. The defense hopes Palm can successfully refute the evidence of prosecution expert Grant Fredericks, who said that the tape could not have been digitally altered. Parts of the media have dubbed this the "Little Man Defense" or the "Wayans Defense."

The clip showed the couple on the tape having sex in what the state says is the hot tub room at Kelly's former home. Their bodies slowly become transparent, then slowly reappear. Then their heads slowly disappear until their two headless bodies are romping. At one point, the man on the tape - his head intact - appears to be having sex with a headless woman.

The heads come and go "like ghosts" on the manipulated tape Palm said.

Palm also showed a clip of the tape which the state says showed a mole. Though a spot that corresponds with a mole on Kelly's back was clearly visible in 17 frames of video Fredericks played for the jury last week, no such mole was visible in the frames Palm showed.

The spots which appeared on the man in the tape's back were "video noise," not moles, Grant said.

He added, "There were marks in the image that came and went and basically they were artifacts that were propagated through the image."

Moving on to the tape of the headless couple that he'd prepared, Palm said that there are many commercially available computer software packages that allow people to manipulate video. It is easy to overlay moving images over a stationary background, he said.

"You've got the ability to make people come and go at your will," he said.

It took him only two hours to manipulate a section of the video to show a headless couple having sex, he said. The computer "tools do a lot of the work for you," he said. Fredericks claimed it would take 44 years to digitally manipulate every frame of the 27 minute tape.

Palm said he wasn't a special effects professional, suggesting that an "artist" could do a better job of manipulating the video.

He's now being cross-examined by the state.

Posted by Kim Janssen on June 5, 2008 03:31 PM | Permalink

----
TELL ME THE DEFENSE IS NOT SAYING THIS! OH MY GOD! They've done said ANYTHING NOW!

I thought I heard it all. I hope the prosecution grills him politely.

Headless bodies now!?! Wasn't it the mole a few weeks ago, then six years ago, R. Kelly said it was his brother?

HOW CAN THEY ACQUIT HIM?

R. Kelly covers face as attorney covers his song in court

Ed Genson, one of the attorneys representing R. Kelly, provided one of the most memorable moments in the trial when he boomed "I'm not your sweetie!" at Stephanie "Sparkle" Edwards.

This afternoon he provided another. Objecting to a copy of Kelly's album, "R." being admitted into evidence for the jury to peruse, Genson told Judge Gaughan that the sexually explicit lyrics in the liner notes could prejudice the jury against Kelly.

Asked by Gaughan precisely what lyrics he objected to the jury seeing, Genson then read the lyrics from one song on the album at length. Genson's soft voice could not be fully heard from the press benches, but his performance was enough to reduce prosecutor Shauna Boliker and everyone else within earshot to fits of giggles.

As Genson recited the lyrics, Kelly covered his face.

Click here for all the lyrics to all the songs on "R."

Gaughan decided that the jury can have the CD, but the lyrics will be blacked out.
----
Damn, now one of R. Kelly's most successful albums will be used against him. I wanted them to use "12 Play"!

"Your body is my playground", lol.
Or the memorable line from "Bump & Grind":
"My mind's telling me no
But my body's telling me yes!"


[Edited 6/5/08 14:35pm]

R. Kelly's business manager Derrel McDavid "doesn't exist"

R. Kelly's business manager, Derrel McDavid, was identified by Lisa Van Allen today as the man who paid her and another man $20,000 each to turn over a copy of an R. Kelly sex tape.

McDavid has been in court most days during the trial, often sitting next to Kelly at the defense table, whispering discreetly in the star's ear. He was in court again this morning, but he'd gone by the time his name came up.

When Van Allen mentioned his name, it reminded me of a passing encounter I witnessed a couple of weeks ago during jury selection. MTV News writer Jennifer Vineyard grabbed McDavid in the corridor outside the court and, noting that he'd been talking to Kelly, asked who he was.

His response?

"I don't exist."

It was all very reminiscent of a courtroom scene in the classic 1976 Watergate film, "All The President's Men." In the film, reporter Bob Woodward, played by Robert Redford, talks to a man who's sitting in the public benches, watching the Watergate burglars appear before a judge for the first time.

When Woodward asks the man if he's there for the Watergate case, he gives a reply similar to McDavid's.

"I'm not here," he says.

----
@ his attorney's response. CLASSIC!

I LOVE THE CHICAGO SUN TIMES! Fuck the Tribune.

Oh so you covering ya face NOW???? You shoulda been ashamed when you wrote that shit. And as for songs that might prejudice the jury, we just need to call one into evidence "Age Ain't Nothing but a Number." Whatcha gotta say now????

LOL! Exactly. I'm just finding about all of this now.

I'm shocked no one else covered these tidbits!

Poor Ed Genson.

Ya'll know I'm smiling right now

bboy87 said:

I know you would dig all this information!

"Headless bodies"... he done destroyed his fucking credibility!

R. Kelly Defense Lawyers: That’s Not His Mole In That Sex Tape

June 6, 2008
Link


The defense in the R. Kelly trial continued their assault against the prosecution’s case yesterday, calling to the stand witnesses that attempted to cast doubt on the prosecution’s key arguments.

The defense called a private investigator who testified that Lisa Van Allen – the supposed third person in the threesome sex tape – and her fiancé attempted to extort money from Kelly by threatening to sign a $300,000 tell-all book deal.

Kelly’s lawyers also attacked the prosecution’s argument that the man in the sex tape has a black mole on his back that identifies him as Kelly, calling to the stand a forensic video analyst who said the mole that appears on the video is actually just “an artifact of electronic noise.”

Well if the mole won't solve it, then "Get Up on a Room" will. Apparently that song among others on R. Kelly's "R" album will be used as evidence in the deliberation room.

The Debut of the "Ghost Sex" Defense

from: Josh Levin

Where would the defense be without Yul Brown and his Amazing Hypercolor Dreamsuit? For the last several days, R. Kelly's team has stopped defending its client and started highlighting the scheming ways and impressive girth of prosecution witness Lisa Van Allen's betrothed. (The prosecution says Van Allen admitted to having threesomes with R. Kelly and the alleged victim in this case because it was "the right thing to do"; the defense says the woman, with the help of her beefy fiance, was shopping her testimony to both sides.) Defense attorney Sam Adam Sr., for one, now asks almost every witness to guess the height and weight of the Mo Vaughn-resembling Brown. (Estimates cluster around 6-foot-2 and 240 pounds.) On Wednesday, Adam Sr. asked defense-team law clerk Jason Wallace, who's also a licensed NFL agent, whether he had in fact "seen a lot of NFL men smaller than Brown." Today, Adam Sr. asks Jack Palladino, an investigator hired by the defense to go to Atlanta and interview Brown and Van Allen, whether the former was intimidated by the presence of a hard-boiled private dick. Palladino laughs. "I don't think Mr. Brown intimidates easily," he says.

For weeks, the R. Kelly trial has been a celebrity case in search of a celebrity witness. Palladino—not to be confused with his pal, wiretapper extraordinaire Anthony Pellicano—is that celebrity, a Hollywood PI who'll kick your @ss and charge you $1,000 an hour for the privilege. In 1992, Bill Clinton hired the bald, bearded detective, who looks like a streetwise James Lipton, to handle his campaign's frequent "bimbo eruptions"; Palladino has also worked for defendants like Michael Jackson and the Menendez Brothers, among others. Palladino doesn't intimidate easily himself. On the stand, he exudes the disdain of someone who has fried and consumed bigger fish than a lowly state's attorney or an overgrown, sartorially adventurous schemer. Palladino says that when he met with the pair for dinner at the Four Seasons, Brown mentioned repeatedly that his bride-to-be had a $300,000 book deal. "Yes, and I mocked them about it," Palladino says in a low, even tone. Believing he'd sussed out a coded attempt to solicit a bribe—essentially, pay us $300,000, or Van Allen will testify against her alleged former threesome partner—Palladino claims he then announced, "My client is never going to pay you." The couple left soon thereafter. The private investigator expresses remorse that Brown and Van Allen chose not to get a doggie bag for the pizza they'd ordered.

Everything the detective describes sounds like a scene from the Jack Palladino Mysteries—"He ate the pizza alone, slowly. He'd killed a man in this joint before, and he'd do it again if he didn't get any breadsticks." On the cross, prosecutor Robert Heilingoetter can't ruffle the PI's understated machismo. The state's attorney asks whether having a book deal is a crime. Palladino says it isn't, but only if it's a real deal rather than a thinly veiled cash grab. "Does everybody in this country who wants a book deal have to clear it through Jack Palladino?" Heilingoetter asks sarcastically. The book version: "The detective hesitated, reluctant to reveal the extent of his thriving literary agency." The real-life version: Palladino smirks silently, knowing he's won the day. On Wednesday, the prosecution scored by repeatedly pointing the jury to identical-looking, side-by-side photos of Sex Tape Girl and the alleged victim. In choosing to engage with Palladino on the subject of bribes and book deals, Heilingoetter has lost before he's begun. By defending Van Allen and Brown, the prosecution is doing the defense a huge favor—holding the spotlight on a couple of alleged anti-Kelly conspirators rather than concentrating on what and who is on that 27-minute sex tape.

Later in the afternoon, the defense brings the tape back into focus, calling its forensic video expert Charles Palm. Compared to the relentlessly amusing Palladino, whose stagy exchanges with Heilengoetter had the jury rapt (and occasionally in hysterics), Palm is a cadaver. (It pays to be the life of the witness stand, by the way. While Palladino says he cleared between $10,000 and $15,000 to stay at the Four Seasons, Palm has earned $20,000 for spending four years analyzing digitized urine.) For a half-hour, the video expert drones on about the different kinds of noise one might see on a VHS tape and the ins and outs of various video-editing suites. The lights then go down, and he begins drawing red circles around a bare behind. Now this is entertaining.

Palm, the czar of the sex-tape telestrator, first focuses on what the defense calls the "back sequence"—a half-second, 20-frame segment near the start of the tape that (depending on which VHS guru you believe) either debunks or shores up R. Kelly's where's-my-prominent-mole defense. I wasn't in the courtroom when Grant Fredericks, the prosecution's forensic video analyst, stepped through the back sequence last week, but my fellow reporters tell me that Fredericks zoomed in and stripped away some of the noise, revealing a telltale black spot in the neighborhood of Kelly's spine. Palm, by contrast, continually highlights and circles the nonmole noise—black marks that appear then disappear—and responds in the negative as defense attorney Marc Martin advances the tape: "Do you see a mole? Next frame. Do you see a mole?" Palm is right: It's impossible to see the mole on an unmagnified, low-quality videotape. Fortunately for the prosecution, the video does not depict two moles having sex. Rather than the "back sequence," a less forensically inclined viewer might term this the "guy who looks like R. Kelly taking off his shirt and pants sequence."

Next, Palm turns our attention to the "ghost sex sequence." To demonstrate how one might fake a sex tape, Palm has extracted a section from the video where there are no people on the screen, just plants and a wooden bench, and turned this into the background layer. He then cut out a clip of Sex Tape Man and Sex Tape Girl having intercourse from later in the tape, making this the foreground. As Palm increases the opacity of the foreground layer, the once-empty log cabin is gradually filled by the specter of bench sex. As he decreases the opacity of the bench-intercourse layer, the phantasms gradually fade away, then disappear entirely.

At first blush, this trickery looks creepy and impressive—Palm shifted the sex ghosts in space-time, and it looks real! Plus, the defense's video analyst says this took him only a few hours to accomplish. That's a lot faster than the 44 years that prosecution expert Fredericks said it would take to fabricate the tape. (Palm, by comparison, says it would take merely a couple of months to bring such a project to completion.)

Think about it for a few more seconds, though, and it's hard to see what exactly Palm is accomplishing, besides finding a way to make a weird, creepy sex tape even weirder and creepier. Palm has proven that you can cut up a pre-existing video of two people having sex to make it look like a new video of those two people having sex. He has not addressed the main occupational hazards for the R. Kelly sex-tape forger: stealing footage of a log cabin and/or building your own log cabin set, fabricating an audio track, finding actors who are happy to urinate on camera and participate in a blackmail scheme, unearthing previously unseen footage of the framees with their faces contorted in a sex-having manner, then extracting their heads and placing them on the bodies of the stunt copulators.

To his credit, Palm does try to address that last obstacle. This part of the demonstration is prefaced by a title card reading "With and Without Heads." The scene begins: straightforward log-cabin sex. Then Sex Tape Man's head disappears. The sex continues unabated. Both heads disappear. John the Baptist and Marie Antoinette continue going at it. He then shows off an altered version. "I took a head off of a different section of the tape that had nothing to do with this," Palm announces, "and yet if you look at it, it looks like fairly natural kind of movement." We then see a two-second sequence in which Sex Tape Man's Future Head is transplanted onto Sex Tape Man's Past Body. Even though the two halves belong to the same person, the movement looks herky-jerky.

Palm says that this is just a demo designed to show what's technically possible—he admits that his work would be detectable by a forensic video analyst or "anybody who's got good eyesight." If Palm could conjure this in just a few hours, though, shouldn't he have gone a little further? Imagine the impact of a video in which Sex Tape Man's head was placed on both bodies such that the R. Kelly look-alike was peeing on his own face and not-his-own breasts. That's what I call weird and creepy.

On cross-examination, prosecutor Shauna Boliker gets Palm to admit that he could not detect any fakery on the sex tape—he simply wasn't able to rule out that any chicanery had taken place. Boliker tries to prove the video's authenticity by showing a reel of hard-to-fake scenes: a glint in the girl's eyes as she receives a handful of money, a shot of their bodies writhing together, a few seconds of the girl urinating on the floor (a clip the prosecution has labeled, euphemistically, "clip3water").

"Is it true that water or urination would be difficult to fake?" Boliker asks. While Pixar would agree with that sentiment, Palm says that "a lot of things would be possible to fake at this level." His theory is that VHS recorders were used to cover up the fakery—that the image degradation on the third- or fourth-generation copies sold on street corners and received by the Sun-Times' Jim DeRogatis was an attempt to hide the cutting and pasting of a digital-effects maestro. Such changes would be easy to spot on the big screen, but much harder to suss out on a crappy video. (Also, while Palm doesn't protest, Boliker isn't being fair to him here. He's not suggesting that the urine on the tape is a special effect. In the Palm scenario, all of the urine on the tape would be real; the fake part would be the head attached to the urinator's body.)

The week of testimony ends with Kelly's attorneys finally bidding adieu to the Little Man theory. The new defense premise: the Michael Jordan theory. The classic Gatorade ad showing the young Michael Jordan playing one-on-one against the old Michael Jordan, defense attorney Marc Martin says, reveals the kind of magic you can create by superimposing images. Watch the commercial, though, and you'll notice that you rarely see the two Jordans' faces at the same time; when you do, it looks fake. Not to mention that the video is short, cost a ton of money, and doesn't show young Michael Jordan peeing on old Michael Jordan. I remain unconvinced, and I imagine the jury does as well.

That's all for me from Chicago. I'll be back with a report once the verdict comes down, which shouldn't be too long now. Until then, remember: The safest sex is ghost sex.
----
If the jury doesn't see it way this guy and most of us do, there's no hope for us common folk!

I don't know if I can keep following this trial.

Knowing that Kelly is sitting there putting people through this--it's his mole, it's not his mole, is his head, it's not his head, it's his pee, it's not his pee, that's her mullet, that's some other girl's mullet... I can't.

Pixar was not hired to put together some damn child porn tape.

I just want to wait to hear the verdict and I'm getting a little afraid that he might walk... free to make more crappy music and pee on underaged girls and later have them braid his damn hair.

JackieBlue said:

At this point, if they let him walk, they're the most stupidest mothafuckas ever hired to be in the jury pool but I'm gonna hold my judgment until the verdict.

carlcranshaw said:

@ Timmy.. wow, i dont need to check the news.. the scoop is all right here.. thank you for posting.. i have to go back n read all this.. he's not locked up yet though?

Flowerz said:

Thanks!

Flowerz said:

Timmy's holdin it down for Prince.org and King of Pop Discussion

bboy87 said:

Ya know it.

Timmy84 said:

please keep posting ... R.Kelly should have been in jail long ago

Flowerz said:

Ya bet I will.

Flowerz said:

something Prince fans AND MJ fans can agree on

A case of discomfort
Man on video in R. Kelly trial: He did what?

By Rex W. Huppke
June 8, 2008

The elephant in the room at the ongoing child pornography trial of R&B icon R. Kelly is the fact that the man shown in the amateur sex video—the prosecution's key piece of evidence—seems to take pleasure in urinating on his sex partner.

Tearing away from the heinous possibility that the girl in the video may be underage, a question on the minds of many who have followed Kelly's case is: Who on earth would want to urinate on someone else, or be urinated on themselves?

The question might not make for polite dinner conversation, or even a topic normally discussed in a family newspaper. But that has not stopped people from talking about it.

The act performed in the video has gained widespread notoriety in the realm of popular culture. An episode of "Sex and the City" once explored the practice. Comedian Dave Chappelle brought the issue into millions of homes in 2003 with a mock music video in which he dresses and croons likes R. Kelly, guzzling a gallon bottle of water, spraying dancers with a garden hose and singing a song titled "[I Wanna] Pee on You."

The intermingling of sex and urine—known by the euphemism "watersports"—has been around for centuries, but it still makes most people cringe.

Lawyers in the Kelly case warned prospective jurors that they would have to witness "acts you've never seen before." Journalists reporting on the case have had to tiptoe gently around what is often viewed—some would argue incorrectly—as a deviant act.

Sex therapists say that while watersports are not a common practice, plenty of healthy, consenting adults engage in them for an array of reasons.

"There are indeed people who do it as an act of anger," said Gloria Brame, a Georgia-based licensed therapist and author of the book "Different Loving." "But there are a lot of people who think it's groovy. . . . It's a breaking of taboo."

Taboo breakers, however, are rarely viewed fondly by mainstream society, and many assume people who engage in unusual sex acts suffer some form of mental disorder.

The American Psychiatric Association puts sexual fetishes under the category of paraphilia, a disorder that could involve all manner of acts that deviate from what is considered normal sexual activity. But for the disorder to be officially diagnosed in a person, the sexual act in question must result in "clinically significant" mental distress or social impairment.

Until 1973, the APA's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Health listed homosexuality as a paraphilia. Clearly, psychiatry changes with the times.

"As American society gets more open about sexual practices, the APA is loath to put in a disorder category any act that's happening between two consenting adults," said William Narrow, associate director of the APA's research division. "There has been some scientific debate as to whether these paraphilias should actually be classified as mental disorders or not."

Margie Nichols, a New Jersey sex therapist and member of the American Association of Sexuality Educators, Counselors and Therapists, puts it this way: "If it's consensual between two adults, who cares? It's unusual, that's all."

Many in the sexual education field are pushing for the APA to further de-pathologize non-typical sexual acts like watersports and S&M, with the caveat that they are performed between consenting adults.

"People are going to stigmatize sexual behavior anyway, you don't need a diagnostic manual to do that," said Russell Stambaugh, a sex therapist in Ann Arbor, Mich. "This is not a public health menace. An act doesn't constitute a mental disorder."

Which is not to say the behavior lacks a psychoanalytical component. Many believe the enjoyment of more adventurous forms of sexual activity has roots in an individual's past.

"Tell me how you were loved as a child, and I'll tell you how you make love as an adult," said Joe Kort, a therapist and an adjunct professor of gay and lesbian studies at Wayne State University.

Patients who engage in watersports, Kort said, have often traced their desires back to issues surrounding potty training. Or perhaps moments when they wet their pants and were humiliated.

"Some of these moments can become so painful to deal with, the psyche blocks it, buries it down," Kort said. "But nothing stays locked down. It will come out somewhere and you will re-enact it until you heal it. It's sort of like trauma turns into triumph. The event becomes eroticized."

Then there are those, experts say, who, despite our societal norms, simply find the act of urinating sexy.

"It's a very intimate sort of act," said Susan Wright of the National Coalition for Sexual Freedom, an advocacy group based in Baltimore. "It's a little naughty, a little exciting, a little titillating. I think it really is considered a very innocuous sort of activity."

Rex W. Huppke is a Tribune reporter.

Timmy84 said:

----
@ trying to explain the pissing.
[Edited 6/8/08 16:11pm]

IMO, the key sentence in this article is "If it's consensual between two adults, who cares? It's unusual, that's all." Which I agree 100% with.

However, in Sylvester's case this is not a matter of consenting adults. This article would have been more useful if it explored why someone would be excited by urinitating on a 13-14 year old child. That IS a pathological.
[Edited 6/8/08 16:32pm]

SCNDLS said:

That's why I laughed. Like how does that explain R. Kelly's case at all? If you want real news about the trial, view the Sun Times. The Tribune sounds like Kells fans.

carlcranshaw said:

Oh lawd! That is some funny sh!t!

Sadly, I can actually see him writing some piece of crap like this!

JediMaster said:

Knowing his old creepy ass, he probably has.