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| - Does a viral video show singer R. Kelly walking out of prison after being pardoned by U.S. President Donald Trump in 2025? No, that's not true: The scene predated the singer's conviction in the 2022 criminal trial. As of this writing, R. Kelly is still on the list of currently incarcerated people on the Federal Bureau of Prisons website.
The claim reappeared in a post on Facebook that republished a January 26, 2025, video from Instagram (archived here). The clip's caption read:
Incarcerated Singer R. Kelly Released From Prison After Being Pardoned By US President Donald Trump.
This is what the post looked like on Facebook at the time of writing:
(Source: Facebook screenshot taken on Wed Apr 2 14:10:14 2025 UTC)
The entry implied that the purported pardon was signed in 2025 after Trump had been sworn into office for the second time on January 20, 2025.
The full name of the 58-year-old singer is Robert Sylvester Kelly.
Though with a typo, the website of the Federal Bureau of Prisons still showed him as an inmate, as of this writing:
(Source: Federal Bureau of Prisons screenshot taken on Wed Apr 2 14:15:13 2025 UTC)
In 2022, R. Kelly was sentenced to 30 years in prison for "racketeering and multiple predicate acts conviction, including illegal sex with minors, sexual exploitation of minors, bribery, coercion and forced labor", a press release (archived here) issued by the U.S. Attorney's Office in the Eastern District of New York detailed.
The footage reused in the viral video predated that. Photos depicting the singer with the same two men, with all three wearing the same outfits, were published in 2019, as seen, for example, in a Voice of America report (archived here) from that year. The caption under the image reads:
Singer R. Kelly, center, walks with his attorney, Steve Greenberg, right, and an unidentified man, left, who gave him a ride after Kelly's release from Cook County Jail, March 9, 2019, in Chicago.
A search on Google News for the keywords seen here did not produce any credible reports about Trump purportedly pardoning R. Kelly between the day of his second inauguration and this writing.
Lead Stories manually reviewed the list of pardons and commutations signed by the president, which is available on the website of the U.S. Department of Justice. None of the documents contained the singer's name as of March 31, 2025, when the list was last updated.
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Other Lead Stories fact checks concerning entertainment can be found here.
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