MUSIC PREDATOR’S
Victims of R. Kelly finally saw justice done to their abuser this week. Many had waited decades for their story to be heard while the music industry turned a blind eye, writes Kathy McCabe
R&B singer R. Kelly was the subject of persistent and harrowing allegations of kidnapping, sexual abuse and violence against under-age black girls and young women for more than two decades.
His victims, who had been threatened and silenced while his enablers in the music industry turned a blind eye, finally won justice this week.
Robert Sylvester Kelly, 54, was found guilty of nine federal charges of racketeering and sex trafficking in a New York and faces between 10 years and life in prison.
The wheels of justice picked up speed after the harrowing documentary series Surviving R. Kelly aired in early 2019 painstakingly made the case against him with first-hand accounts of victims, many of whom had never told their story before.
They shared how he would seek out teen girls at malls and drive by high schools, imprison them in hotel rooms and his homes, coerce them to perform sex acts on him in front of his friends, dictate how they dressed, what they ate, who they spoke to, and used his money, power and fame to silence them.
“People will say, ‘Well, why didn’t anyone notice?’ The answer is we all noticed. No one cared because we were black girls,” one victim said. Everyone did know.
The public signs of Kelly’s depravity had been obvious since 1994.
That was the year Kelly, then 27, married 15-year-old rising R&B star Aaliyah.
He was the lead songwriter and producer on her debut album, Age Ain’t Nothing But A Number.
The marriage was annulled the following year after a magazine exposed that she had lied on the wedding certificate, when stating her age as 18.
A former Kelly tour manager testified during his New York trial last month the singer had bribed a government official to obtain a fake ID for Aaliyah so they could wed. She would die in a plane crash in 2001.
Tiffany Hawkins became the first young woman to publicly accuse the Believe I Can Fly chart-topper of sexual abuse in 1996. She was a 15-year-old aspiring singer and met him in her hometown of Chicago, jumping off the bus with a friend when they spotted him in a car nearby.
He invited her to his home and asked her to bring her friends, who were aged between 14 and 16. He would later encourage her to have group sex with him and his friends and other underage girls.
Hawkins sued him for $10m in damages for emotional distress in 1996 but the matter was settled out of court for an undisclosed sum two years after it was filed.
Kelly faced his next lawsuit alleging sexual harm in 2001 when Tracy Sampson, a former intern at Epic Records – a subsidiary of Sony – accused him of inducing her “into an indecent sexual relationship” when she was 17.
In an early 2019 interview as Surviving R. Kelly was being aired, Sampson said the R&B predator counted on young girls being unprepared for his exploitation.
She said: “(He asked) ‘Can I kiss you?’ and I was like, ‘No’, to which he responded, ‘Well, give me a hug’’ And then, like, when I gave him a hug he just started kissing me,” she said.
“I was in love with him. I just didn’t know what to do. Like, I didn’t know if this was normal. I didn’t know if this is how adults acted.”
Two more cases were lodged in 2002. Chicago woman Patrice Jones alleged he made her pregnant when she was under-age and forced her to have an abortion.
Montina Woods, a dancer who toured with Kelly collaborators the Isley Brothers, claimed he secretly filmed them having sex and the footage was widely distributed as the
R. Kelly Triple X sex tape.
He was indicted on child pornography charges in 2002 after another sex tape featuring Kelly with a minor was sent to the Chicago Sun Times who passed it onto police.
It took six years for the case to be brought to trial, with the singer acquitted of all charges in 2008 with the jury unable to conclude the girl on the tape was under-age.
Chicago journalist Jim DeRogatis, who published his first report on allegations of Kelly having sex with underage girls in 2000, delivered the killer blow in 2017 with his Buzzfeed investigation of the singer’s “sex cult”.
The article alleged Kelly seduced young women who approached him to help their music careers and took control of their lives, dictating “what they eat, how they dress, when they bathe, when they sleep, and how they engage in sexual encounters that he records”.
According to the former employees and parents of several girls, he had confiscated their mobile phones to stop them contacting family and friends.
That report opened the floodgates, with victims breaking the nondisclosure agreements they were forced to sign, to speak publicly about their torturous experiences with the man who had continued to be embraced by fans and the industry throughout the decades of claims levelled against him.
The report was followed by the launch of the #MuteRKelly campaign which targeted his label RCA Records, publisher Universal, concert promoters, ticketing agencies and streaming platforms, demanding they cut him from their books and stop profiting from his music, all of it made as he faced one lawsuit after another.
“Only God can mute me. Am I supposed to go to jail or lose my career because of your opinion?” he sang with gross defiance on a song called I Admit he released on SoundCloud in 2018.
The comprehensive documentary series Surviving R. Kelly arrived in early 2019, forensically detailing the sexual abuse allegations against the singer via interviews with victims and their parents.
By February, he had been dropped by his label and by mid year, he was facing two separate federal indictments in New York and Chicago.
He was found guilty of all charges in the New York proceedings this week. He faces further court proceedings in Illinois – 10 counts of aggravated criminal sexual abuse – and in Minnesota, and has denied all charges.