With Mr. Kelly, she said, she reached a new low.
“I’ve never been treated like that before or since,” she said. “He humiliated me, he degraded me, he scared me. I’ll never forget the way he treated me.”
Stephanie was 17 for most of the time that she spent with Mr. Kelly, she said, noting that she was clear with him about her age, but that he did not care.
Their interactions lasted about six months, mostly while Stephanie was 17, she said, noting that she was always upfront about her age, but that the singer didn’t care.
Stephanie recalled that Mr. Kelly had two sides: “He was very nice and charming, jovial,” she said, “Or he was very controlling, intimidating. He would raise his voice at me and could put the fear of God in me very quickly.”
She said that he was particularly controlling during sex.
“It was humiliating,” said Stephanie, who was accompanied to court on Thursday by Gloria Allred. “He would be very specific about how he would want me to be. He would put me in positions he wanted me to be in,” she said, noting that sometimes he would direct her to get completely naked, assign her a position and then leave the room — sometimes for hours.
If he returned and she was not still in the same position, he would become angry, she said.
Mr. Kelly’s defense homed in on Stephanie’s decision to continue seeing the singer, and Nicole Blank Becker, one of Mr. Kelly’s four lawyers, noted that in Illinois the age of consent is 17. (That Illinois law is only applicable if the age difference between partners is no more than five years; at the time, Mr. Kelly was 32.)
Accusations of criminal activity that dates to the 1990s would typically be too old to prosecute. But the racketeering charge, which claims that Mr. Kelly was the head of a criminal scheme that preyed on women and underage girls for sex, allows the government to introduce evidence from any time that was part of the conspiracy that prosecutors are seeking to prove.