YouTube has permanently suspended two channels of disgraced R&B singer, Robert Sylvester Kelly, popularly known as R. Kelly, who was found guilty of sex offences last week.
On Tuesday, YouTube removed the two channels — RKellyTV, which had 3.5 million subscribers, and RKellyVevo, which had about 1.6 million subscribers— citing a violation of its terms of service, Variety reports.
The platform will not allow him to create any new channels in the future.
However, YouTube has not banned R. Kelly’s music. The internet video giant will continue to offer the singer’s music catalogue on YouTube Music.
Attempts to watch videos on the now-removed channels display a message that says: “This video is no longer available because the YouTube account associated with this video has been terminated.”
According to Bloomberg, YouTube Vice President of legal, Nicole Alston, wrote in a memo: “Egregious actions committed by R. Kelly warrant penalties beyond standard enforcement measures due to a potential to cause widespread harm. Ultimately we are taking this action to protect our users similar to other platforms.”
YouTube’s move to delete R. Kelly’s channels comes eight days after a federal jury found him guilty of racketeering on eight charges of an anti-sex trafficking law. The singer is set to be sentenced on May 4, 2022. He faces 10 years to life in prison.
YouTube said it pulled down the channels linked to R. Kelly in accordance with its “creator responsibility guidelines.”
That policy prohibits “on- and/or off-platform behaviour that we may consider to be inappropriate,” including “intending to cause malicious harm to others” and “participating in abuse or violence, demonstrating cruelty, or participating in fraudulent/deceptive behaviour leading to real-world harm.”
The 54-year-old’s official accounts on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook have also recently been disabled.
R. Kelly’s longtime label, Sony Music’s RCA Records, parted ways with the singer in January 2019 after months of criticism. However, nearly his entire catalogue remains with the label and is still available on major music-streaming services.
In a survey conducted by Morning Consult after R. Kelly’s conviction, 44% of audio-streaming service users said platforms like Spotify and Apple Music should remove his music from their catalogues, while 36% said his songs should stay up and 20% had no opinion or said they didn’t know.
On September 27, R. Kelly was found guilty in New York Federal Court of leading a scheme to recruit women and girls for sex, following decades of women coming forward to accuse him of sex crimes. In 2008, R. Kelly was acquitted of child pornography charges in Illinois, where he is still facing additional charges.
During the trial, one witness alleged that they had seen R. Kelly sexually abuse late R&B star, Aaliyah, in 1993 when she was only 13 or 14, the Associated Press reported.
Witnesses also recounted other alleged crimes by R. Kelly, including that he locked a radio intern in a room where she passed out and he sexually assaulted her, videotaped a woman wiping faeces on her face as punishment for not following his rules, and knowingly gave multiple people herpes.
