10 times Grammy awards nominee Nicki Minaj’s husband Kenneth Petty has been sentenced to a year of in-home detention and three years of probation after failing to register as a sex offender.
The 44-year-old pleaded guilty to the offence last year and was ordered to pay $55,000 (£46,000) for the offence, according to the US Attorney’s Office.
The husband of the rap star was convinced of rape in New York in 1995, for which he served four years in prison.
Nicki and Kenneth moved to California in 2019 but he did not register as a sex offender within the required period of five days.
He faced up to 10 years in prison with a lifetime of supervised release, but CBS report that 44-year-old Petty will instead spend the next 12 months in his and Minaj’s Los Angeles mansion.
The sentence comes despite prosecutors recommending 15 months of prison time and five years of supervised release. Prosecutors are also reported to have advised against home detention as they contended that Petty’s multimillion-dollar home in an affluent gated community wouldn’t be a punishment.
In November 2019, Petty was pulled over by the Beverly Hills Police Department, and it was discovered that while he is a registered sex offender in New York, he had not registered in his new state — which he is legally required to do. Petty is considered a level two offender in the state of New York, which means that he is thought to be at “moderate risk of a repeat offence.
He was sentenced to 54 months in prison in 1995 and served almost four years after he was convicted of one count of attempted rape in the first degree.
In court records obtained by the Blast, Petty was accused of pressing an object to the back of his 16-year-old victim as she walked to school and told her to “keep walking” until they got to his home. He then allegedly began to rape her at knifepoint before the victim struck him with a bottle and escaped.
The alleged incident took place in September 1994, and Petty’s friends are reported to have harassed the victim’s family at the time, forcing her to relocate to Florida. In August 2021, Petty’s alleged rape victim, Jennifer Hough, filed a lawsuit against both him and Minaj as she claimed that they were trying to coerce her into recanting her allegation, Hough alleged that shortly after Petty’s 2019 arrest, Minaj called her and offered to fly her over to Los Angeles or Minaj’s publicist to Hough. When Hough declined, she and her family allegedly “suffered an onslaught of harassing calls and unsolicited visits.”Hough accused the couple of “witness intimidation, intentional infliction of emotional distress, harassment” in the lawsuit.
According to the New York Times, Hough claims that she was offered varying degrees of payment — from $20,000 to $500,000 — if she signed a statement that renounced her original allegations against Petty. In January of this year, Minaj was voluntarily dismissed from the lawsuit, but Hough pursued the charges against Petty.
In May, it was reported that Hough is no longer seeking a “default judgment” against Petty, but a resolution between the pair has seemingly still not been reached.
Kenneth also served seven years in prison in 2006 after pleading guilty to first-degree manslaughter.
The ‘Pink Friday’ rapper married Kenneth, who she had been childhood friends with, in 2019 after a year of dating.
The couple welcomed their first child; a baby boy, in September 2020.
Nicki is yet to announce the name of her son but often refers to him as ‘Papa Bear’ on social media.
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