Source: Dutch Press Photo/WENN.com; SplashNews.com / WENN and Splash
Nicki Minaj‘s brother Jelani Maraj just received quite the sentence following a guilty verdict in his child rape trial.
According to TMZ, a judge in a New York court sentenced him to 25 years to life in prison on Monday.
Back in 2017, Maraj was found guilty of predatory sexual assault against a child and endangering the welfare of a child. The trial as a whole, per reports, only lasted close to three weeks.
In 2015, Maraj was initially arrested and charged for sexually assaulting the pre-teen daughter of his then wife, Jacqueline Robinson. He and Robinson wed a few months prior to his arrest. Defense attorney’s pushed that Robinson and her children (she also had a young son) were lying on Maraj in a grab for Nicki Minaj’s money.
“It’s about money and it’s about revenge against the family, the Maraj family,” attorney David Schwartz said in 2017. “[The mother] needed the marriage first … before breaking out her master plan. It only took [her] four months to unleash hell on this family.”
However, the victim’s testimony was very compelling, with the child testifying (13 at the time) that the abuse began in the spring of 2015 while living with her mom and Maraj in Long Island. She claimed he would assault her after school and that her brother walked in during one incident, pushing her to break her silence.
As for Minaj, though she initially didn’t distance herself from Maraj, visiting him when locked up, she declined to testify on behalf of her brother after his attorney said that she would. Minaj actually threatened to sue a reporter in late 2018 after he claimed that she “defended” her brother while speaking on her then new relationship with now husband Kenneth Petty, a convicted sex offender. Minaj wasn’t having it.
“You just lied on me on nat’l TV & now you’re being sued,” she said on social media at the time. “You better be able to back up what you just said about me with FACTS.”
