Sneed scoop: What sent R. Kelly to the hospital for surgery

Sneed has learned exclusively it was a hernia that sent singer R. Kelly from a jail cell to a North Shore hospital within the past week.

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Robert Kelly jail booking photo

The R. Kelly Rx . . .

Sneed has learned exclusively the details of what sent singer R. Kelly from a jail cell to a North Shore hospital within the past week.

Kelly’s sudden journey to the gurney, caused from pains to the gut and the groin, resulted in hernia surgery and dealing with some stomach issues. Sneed is told he has no medical insurance. 

  • Translation: Kelly’s surgery was not handled like that of a routine inmate, according to his attorney Steve Greenberg. “I presume the Bureau of Prisons selected the hospital,” he said.

“He was limping when I visited him at the MCC [Metropolitan Correctional Facility] and he showed me the result of his surgery — three major stomach incisions — and I don’t think he’d had much time to recover,” said another Kelly attorney, Shady Yassin. 

“No visitors were permitted during his hospital stay, he was back in his jail cell to recover right after surgery, and the incisions still looked pretty raw when I saw him Thursday,” added Yassin, who described himself as one of Kelly’s attorneys on the sexual assault charge in Cook County court before Cook County Judge Lawrence Flood. 

Greenberg tells Sneed his client had been suffering from hernia issues and “was planning on surgery shortly before he was arrested last July.”

The singer also told Yassin he is suffering from a “severe numbness” in his hands and elbows, which seems to be moving to the left side of his head. 

“He is now taking pain medication following surgery and jail physicians are looking into his complaints of numbness, which they told him could be nerve damage.” 

The surgery has also affected one of Kelly’s favorite pastimes during his MCC incarceration for a slew of sexual assault cases: shooting hoops.

“Look, Kelly is not sitting idly while at the MCC,” Yassin said. 

“He is still in recovery, so he can’t play basketball . . . but he had been taking meditation classes, attending church on Sunday and participating in church activities. He is NOT just sulking in his cell. He is trying to be positive. All this negative publicity has taken its toll on him. And he talks frequently about wanting to have a relationship with his children.” 

Less than a week after his surgery, Cook County prosecutors said they would go to trial first on an aggravated sexual abuse charge alleging Kelly tried to force oral sex on a woman identified in court documents only as L.C., his 24-year-old hairdresser, on the city’s Near North Side in 2003. 

Kelly could also face federal trial as early as this spring in Chicago on charges of conspiring to rig his 2008 child pornography trial in Cook County.

Greenberg also claims Kelly spends time in his small cell watching college basketball and “singing,” 

“The guy is a genius at writing songs and music in his head. And even though he can’t read or write . . . he remembers all of it by singing it,” said Greenberg.

“He even sings when he is talking to you,” he added. 

“It’s like talking to someone in a musical. He is talking in sentences and then he breaks in singing the next sentence as a song. It’s pretty startling and remarkable!”

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