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Video Expert Testifies In R. Kelly Trial

CHICAGO (AP) ― A prosecution witness used images of a lower back mole on Thursday to link R. Kelly to a sex tape at the center of the R&B star's child pornography trial, dramatically turning an issue first raised by the defense against him.

The potentially damaging testimony came a week after the singer's own attorneys brought up the mole in their opening statements, arguing that since the man in the graphic 27-minute video did not have a mole, that man could not be Kelly.

But on Thursday, video forensics expert Grant Fredericks froze several frames of the sex tape where a dark spot was visible on the man's back.
For comparison, he showed the jury a still photo taken of Kelly's back after his arrest in 2002, revealing a dark fingernail-sized mole.

"There is a mark on the man's back in the exact same position," said Fredericks, referring to the videotape.

Kelly and his attorneys, who have said the man on the tape is not the singer, looked dejected during the expert's testimony, while prosecutors seemed visibly pleased, appearing to smile as they sat at their courtroom table.

Kelly, 41, is charged with child pornography for allegedly videotaping himself having sex with a girl who prosecutors say was as young as 13. He has pleaded not guilty and faces up to 15 years in prison if convicted.

The alleged victim, now 23, also has denied she is on the video.

Defense attorney Ed Genson grilled Fredericks in cross-examination, suggesting that the spot on the man's back in the video wasn't in the same place as the mole on Kelly's lower back. At another point, Genson said a spot in the video faded in and out of view, and he said it could have been a technical imperfection on the tape.

"The spot -- it's there, it's not there. It's there, it's not there," Genson said, pointing to a monitor as it showed successive frames of the tape where a man turns his back to the camera and begins taking off his pants.

Last week, just before prosecutors played the video for the first time in open court, defense attorney Sam Adam Jr. told jurors they should look for a lower-back mole as they watched, saying confidently that they wouldn't see one.

"There is no mole on his back," Adam said, his voice booming, because Kelly "isn't that man on the tape."

In testimony earlier Thursday, prosecutors also tried to discredit another defense argument: That Kelly's likeness in the video could have been computer-generated.

FBI forensic expert George Skaluba told jurors he saw no evidence of that, saying the video appears to depict "real people in a real environment."

Fredericks later agreed, saying that digitally altering the tape would be almost impossible.

Such videos run at 60 images per second, he said, so someone would have to separately alter around 96,000 frames on the nearly half-hour tape. He estimated that the complicated process could take decades to complete.

"There's nothing fabricated about the events we see here," Fredericks said.

Under cross-examination, Skaluba conceded he wasn't in a position to say if the male on the tape was actually Kelly and not a lookalike or an actor.

Kelly often appeared bored during the nearly eight hours of highly technical testimony on Thursday, slouching slightly in his chair -- his eyelids sometimes drooping, then closing.

But at one point when prosecutors displayed a still photo from the video on a large monitor that showed a male having sex with a young female, the Grammy-winner looked uncomfortable -- furrowing his brow and narrowing his eyes.

After five minutes, the prosecution moved on to another subject but the picture remained on the courtroom monitors. A visibly agitated Genson interrupted prosecutor Shauna Boliker and asked if she really needed to keep the picture on display.

Boliker said no and the photo was removed.

(© 2008 The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.)

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