Nicki Minaj’s beau Kenneth Petty pleads guilty to failing to register as sex offender
Nicki Minaj's husband, Kenneth Petty, pleaded guilty for failure to register as a sex offender, in California, court documents show. Kenneth faces up to 10 years behind bars. The music industry professional's sentencing has been scheduled for January 24, 2022. Kenneth is expected to register as a sex offender due to his 1994 conviction of attempted rape on a 16-year-old, later learned to be a woman named Jennifer Hough. The Sexual Registry suggests he used a “knife/cutting instrument” during the attempted rape and went on to serve an 18 to 54-month sentence.
Back in 2020, the 43-year-old was arrested after being indicted for failure to register as a sex offender, however, at the time he pleaded not guilty and posted $100,000 bail. In court docs obtained by People, Kenneth pleaded guilty on Thursday, September 9 during a virtual hearing with the US District Court for the Central District of California. Aside from facing a maximum sentence of 10 years, Kenneth is also looking at a lifetime of supervised release.
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He relocated to California in July 2019 and as required by law was supposed to register as a result of being convicted of first-degree attempted rape in New York in April 1995. Kenneth who was 16 at the time of the crime, served nearly four years in a New York state prison.
In August 2020, Kenneth sued in order to get his name off New York's Sex Offender Registry, claiming someone else had signed the documents while he was jailed. Kenneth filed papers against the state’s Criminal Justice Services division to remove his name from the registry because he alleges that he wasn’t able to plea his case back in October 2004 while he was serving out a prison sentence. He argued the “Kenny Petty” signature on records agreeing to appear for a registry hearing is a forgery.
Kenneth and Nicki, who share a son together, are also being sued for allegedly harassing the woman who accused him of rape in 1994. The "Starships" rapper offered one of Hough's family members $500,000 if Hough said the rape did not happen, according to the lawsuit. On another occasion, Hough was offered $20,000 if she signed a prepared document recanting her statements about Kenneth, the suit says. He has also spent seven years in jail after being found guilty of manslaughter in 2006. He pleaded guilty to the first-degree manslaughter following the deadly 2002 shooting of a man named Lamont Robinson. He was released in May 2013 on supervised release for five years until May 2018.