Wow. He keeps having too many days like this in the courtroom and he'll be on the wrong end of some sex......in jail.
CHICAGO — "I kind of know her like the back of my hand."
Sitting on the witness stand, a 24-year-old woman named Simha Jamison told the court how she was able to identify the girl on the sex tape at the heart of R. Kelly's child-pornography trial: They were best friends.
She also said the man on the tape is Kelly.
Jamison was among a string of witnesses on Wednesday (May 21) who identified the girl and Kelly on the sex tape, as Jamison's legal guardian, Peter Thomas, and two of the girl's relatives also took the stand. The girl's uncle, Ben Edwards Sr., and her aunt, Edwards' former wife and Chicago police officer Delores Gibson, both testified that they first saw the tape at a December 2001 family meeting held by Ben's sister, Stephanie "Sparkle" Edwards, to discuss legal options. That was about a month and a half before an anonymous copy was sent to the Chicago Sun-Times.
Upon hearing that Sparkle, a former protégé of Kelly's, instigated the meeting and had a copy of the tape in her possession at the time, defense attorney Ed Genson became very antagonistic toward Edwards, to the point that Edwards began answering "I don't recall" to every question about who was in the room when the tape was played. Genson suggested that if Edwards couldn't remember who was there, how could he know who was on the tape at all?
"She's my niece; she's my blood," Edwards retorted. "Why wouldn't I remember her?"
"OK, so your memory is bad," Genson said.
"Am I on trial here?" Edwards asked. "I told the truth. It looks like [my niece] is on the tape. It looks like R. Kelly is on the tape."
Defense attorney Sam Adam Jr. attacked Gibson for not taking the tape from Sparkle to give to the police and instead advising the girl's mother to see a lawyer. Toward the end of his cross-examination of her, he accused Gibson of conspiring with Sparkle to extort Kelly, and of going public when that failed. "You and Sparkle had that tape sent to the Sun-Times, didn't you?" he asked. "No," she said.
Jamison made the strongest witness, retaining her composure throughout. She did not allow Adam to rattle her on cross-examination. She testified that she and the girl had been best friends approximately since the summer after third grade until six years ago. The two girls rode bikes, rollerbladed, played basketball and went shopping together when they hung out, which was "every day," she said
Through her best friend, Jamison said, she also met R. Kelly (godfather to the girl allegedly in the video). The two girls often went places where Kelly played basketball (at a gym called Hoops) and recorded music (at a studio called Trax), as well as his home, including a sauna room known as the "Colorado Room." Frequently, when her friend visited her godfather, Jamison testified, she saw him give her money: "no less than 100 and no more than 500 [dollars]." The exact amount was disputed on cross-examination.
During Jamison's junior year of high school, she said she saw a sex tape at a friend's home, and recognized the two individuals on the tape. "I thought she looked just like my best friend ... (and) her godfather R. Kelly."
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