Aaliyah, the R&B star whom R. Kelly married when she was just 15, figured prominently in the government’s closing argument against Mr. Kelly on Wednesday, as a federal prosecutor presented the pair’s illegal union as a criminal act underlying the racketeering charge.

The prosecutor, Elizabeth Geddes, an assistant U.S. attorney, revisited trial testimony about how Mr. Kelly took a hastily planned flight back to Chicago in August 1994 to deal with an emergency: He thought Aaliyah was pregnant with his child. His solution was to marry her to escape prosecution, and he needed his associates to bribe an Illinois employee to create fake identification for her.

That payment, Ms. Geddes said, is the first act in the racketeering charge. But Ms. Geddes also walked the jury through trial testimony about Mr. Kelly’s sexual abuse of the young singer, which she said was “part of the defendant’s pattern of racketeering.”

Aaliyah, whose full name was Aaliyah Dana Haughton, died in a plane crash in 2001. She and Mr. Kelly were introduced in 1992, when she was 13 years old, and she was the youngest girl that Mr. Kelly has been accused of abusing.

A former teenage backup performer for Mr. Kelly testified at trial that she saw Mr. Kelly, then in his mid-20s, performing oral sex on Aaliyah while on tour sometime around 1993. The backup performer testified that she, too, was sexually abused by Mr. Kelly as a teenager, and that he had wanted her to become Aaliyah’s friend.

Ms. Geddes described the circumstances leading to the 1994 marriage, and Mr. Kelly’s reasoning for the union: he wanted to compel Aaliyah to get an abortion. “No baby, no jail,” Ms. Geddes said.

She argued that Mr. Kelly was not an unaware bystander in the marriage plot carried out by his loyal staff, but rather the active force driving the criminal enterprise.

“Just because you have one of your henchmen do your dirty work doesn’t make you any less responsible,” she said. The marriage was annulled in 1995.

She also used the testimony about Aaliyah to show how teenage girls and Mr. Kelly’s staff and entourage had to behave in order to stay in his “inner circle.” Ms. Geddes cited trial testimony in which Mr. Kelly reportedly told witnesses that they had to “pick a team.”

Demetrius Smith, a former tour manager who accompanied Mr. Kelly to Chicago and took part in arranging for the marriage to go forward, testified that he was uneasy about Mr. Kelly’s relationship with the young singer. But Mr. Smith picked a team, Ms. Geddes said: “He wanted to stay in that inner circle, in that enterprise.”

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