An avid R. Kelly fan has been arrested in the Chicago area on federal charges alleging he threatened to “storm” the U.S. attorney’s office in New York.
Christopher Gunn, 39, of Bolingbrook, was charged in a criminal complaint unsealed Monday in U.S. District Court in Brooklyn with making threats involving serious bodily injury or death.
Gunn, who also goes by the name “DeBoSki,” was arrested here Saturday and appeared Monday afternoon in Chicago’s federal courthouse, where a judge ordered him held in custody pending a detention hearing later this week. Prosecutors are asking that he be brought to New York in custody to face the charges.
According to the complaint, Gunn, who attended at least one day of Kelly’s trial on racketeering charges in September, posted a video on YouTube about a week after the trial ended that showed the location of the U.S. attorney’s office in Brooklyn.
Gunn, who has been identified in previous local news reports as a member of an R. Kelly fan club, allegedly told his viewers to “get real familiar with this building” because “If Kellz goes down, everybody’s going down.”
“That’s where they work at,” Gunn allegedly said in the video. “We’re going to storm they office. … If you ain’t got the stomach for the (expletive) we ’bout to do, I’m asking that you just bail out.”
Gunn also named three prosecutors who were on the case, repeating that he and other unnamed individuals were “going to storm” them as well, the charges alleged.
Shortly after, Gunn shared with viewers a clip from the 1991 movie “Boyz N The Hood” showing a character about to be shot to death, according to the complaint.
Just days ago, Gunn called for Kelly fans to gather at Kelly’s sentencing hearing in Brooklyn on Wednesday. “I have a spot for us allllll to link during the trial, see you there,” he said, according to the charges.
The complaint also alleged that Gunn has been accepting payments on CashApp from people who make comments like “30 rounds.. free R kelly” and “30 rounds on the haters.”
An agent with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security Investigations wrote in the complaint affidavit that he believed the reference to “rounds” referenced Gunn selling firearm ammunition to commenters on his YouTube channel.
Kelly, 55, was convicted by a jury in September of racketeering conspiracy involving 12 individual criminal acts, including sex with multiple underage girls as well as a 1994 scheme to bribe an Illinois public aid official to get a phony ID for the 15-year-old singer Aaliyah so the two could get illegally married.
He’s scheduled to be sentenced in Brooklyn on Wednesday.
Gunn’s YouTube channel, which was still publicly available on Monday, features dozens of videos about Kelly’s case. Some are hours long, and many appear to focus on various players in the Kelly saga: accusers, lawyers, even the judge who presided over his New York trial, whom he describes with homophobic epithets.
Gunn is part of a complicated and apparently lucrative subculture that sprang up on YouTube and social media after the allegations against Kelly exploded in 2019 with the Lifetime docuseries “Surviving R. Kelly,” eventually leading to federal indictments in Brooklyn and Chicago as well as similar charges in Cook County.
Since then, Kelly’s supporters and detractors have devoted countless hours on Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and Instagram parsing every last detail of the singer’s life and the charges against him.
A Bureau of Prisons official is suspected of accessing Kelly’s emails and phone calls while in custody, and leaking them to a different YouTube personality. When a south suburban woman posted Kelly’s $100,000 bail in the Cook County case in February 2019, she instantly became a hot topic of conversation, with some bloggers on social media calling for a boycott of the restaurant she owns, while others wrongly identified her as the operator of a South Side day care.
As the trial unfolded in New York last fall, one blogger, who posts under the name Infamous Sylvia, used actors to read aloud from the trial transcripts, creating what she billed as “role reenactment.”
An attorney for Gunn was not listed on the court docket as of Monday afternoon.
NOTE: A previous version of this story incorrectly stated that Gunn was accused of threatening victims from R. Kelly’s criminal trial. The Jane Doe victims referenced in the charges are the prosecutors from the case.
jmeisner@chicagotribune.com
mcrepeau@chicagotribune.com
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