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After months of delays due to COVID-19 concerns, a federal judge in Chicago on Tuesday set a September trial date for indicted singer R. Kelly but said it’s “not set in stone” given the ongoing uncertainty surrounding the pandemic.

U.S. District Judge Harry Leinenweber said during a brief status hearing that jury selection will tentatively begin Sept. 13 for Kelly and his co-defendants, who are charged with trying to rig Kelly’s 2008 child pornography trial in Cook County by paying off witnesses and victims to change their stories.

Prosecutors said their case is expected to take about three weeks to present. Leinenweber said questionnaires would be sent to potential jurors in the high-profile case in late July.

Kelly’s lawyer, Steven Greenberg, said he would agree to set the date for trial as long as it was flexible if problems arose — including Kelly’s ability to help prepare his defense while locked up at a federal jail in Chicago.

Greenberg said officials at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in the Loop have “done their best” to set up video meetings with Kelly amid a recent virus outbreak at the jail, but still, “our access to our client has been difficult.”

“We’ve had a block of time several days of week … but then the other day, there was no signal from the MCC,” Greenberg said. “That impacts our ability to review documents.”

Greenberg also noted that Kelly is tentatively scheduled to go on trial on separate racketeering charges in New York in April, which could further hamper their ability to prepare the Chicago case.

Kelly, who turns 54 next month, facing potentially decades in prison if convicted in either federal case. He’s also facing felony criminal sexual abuse charges filed in Cook County in February 2019. He’s been in custody since July 2019 when he was arrested while walking his dog outside his apartment in the Trump Tower in Chicago.

Kelly’s two trials have been set and rescheduled numerous times since the pandemic hit in March. Meanwhile, a surge of positive cases within Bureau of Prison facilities has led to several months of lockdowns and seriously hampered the ability of Kelly’s lawyers to meet with him.

Just after Thanksgiving, a new outbreak at the MCC had led to more than 120 inmates being infected with COVID-19, according to information posted on the BOP’s website. As of Tuesday, that number had dropped to just 11.

No deaths among inmates or staff at the MCC have been reported since the pandemic began.

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