read sex accusation against Rkelly in fool.
Former Chicago Sun Times music reporter Jim DeRogatis, who broke
the story of R-Kelly's sexual predation on teenage girls 15 years ago,
has gone into great detail about some of the allegations, which the
R&B legend never went to prison for. What you're about to read will
shock you. R.Kelly didn't only marry a teenager, Aaliyah, he dated and
impregnated many of them...
Jim DeRogatis tells The Village Voice
The accusations were stomach churning. The one young woman,
who had been 14 or 15 when R. Kelly began a relationship with her,
detailed in great length, in her affidavits, a sexual relationship that
began at Kenwood Academy: He would go back in the early years
of his success and go to Lina McLin's gospel choir class. She's a
legend in Chicago, gospel royalty. He would go to her sophomore
class and hook up with girls afterward and have sex with them.
Sometimes buy them a pair of sneakers. Sometimes just letting
them hang out in his presence in the recording studio. She detailed
the sexual relationship that she was scarred by. It lasted about
one and a half to two years, and then he dumped her and she slit
her wrists, tried to kill herself. Other girls were involved. She
recruited other girls. He picked up other girls and made them all
have sex together. A level of specificity that was pretty
disgusting.
Refresh our memories. How did this start for you?
Being a beat reporter, music critic at a Chicago daily, the Sun-Times,
R. Kelly was a huge story for me, this guy who rose from not
graduating from Kenwood Academy, singing at backyard barbecues and
on the El, to suddenly selling millions of records. I interviewed him a
number of times. Then TP2.com came out. I'd written a review that
said the jarring thing about Kelly is that one moment he wants to be
riding you and then next minute he's on his knees, crying and praying to
his dead mother in Heaven for forgiveness for his unnamed sins. It's a
little weird at times. It's just an observation.
The next day at the Sun-Times, we got this anonymous fax -- we
didn't know where it came from. It said: R. Kelly's been under
investigation for two years by the sex-crimes unit of the Chicago
police. And I threw it on the corner of my desk. I thought, "player-
hater." Now, from the beginning, there were rumors that Kelly likes
them young. And there'd been this Aaliyah thing -- Vibe printed,
without much commentary and no reporting, the marriage certificate.
Kelly or someone had falsified her age as 18. There was that. So all this
is floating in the air. This fax arrives and I think, "Oh, this is somebody
playing with this." But there was something that nagged at me as a
reporter. There were specific names, specific dates, and those
great, long Polish cop names. And you're not going to make that crap
up. So I went to the city desk and I asked, "What do we do with this?"
They said, Abdon Pallasch is the courts reporter, why don't you two
look into it and see if there's anything there? And it turns out there
had been lawsuits that had been filed that had never been reported.
When you cover the courts in Chicago or any city, you go twice a day
and you go through the bin of cases that have been filed and every
once in a while Michael Jordan's been sued or someone went bankrupt
and it's this sexy story and you pull it out. These suits had been filed at
4 p.m. on Christmas Eve. Ain't no reporter working at 4 p.m. on
Christmas Eve, and they flew under the radar. So we had these
lawsuits that were explosive and we didn't understand why nobody
had reported them.
So her affidavit, this testimony -- it's all public record?
To this day, any reporter who so cares can go to Cook County and pull
these records, so it drives me crazy, even with some of the eloquent
reconsiderations we've seen of Kelly in recent days, that they keep
saying "rumors" and "allegations". Well, "allegations" is fair, OK. You're
protected as a reporter, any lawsuit that has been filed as fact. The
contents of the lawsuit are protected. So these were not rumors.
These were allegations made in court.
I had purposely not listened to his music since the initial
charges came out and I saw these ninth- and 10th-grade
girls interviewed on TV, talking about how he was in the
parking lot of their school every day and everyone knew
how come. That is what it took for me.
Part of our reporting was sitting with those girls, sitting with their
families, seeing their scars on their wrists, hearing the emotion.
Some of our young critical peers,
they're 24 and all they know of Kelly's past is some vague
sense of scandal, because they were introduced to him as
kids via Space Jam. A lot of your reporting on this is not
online, it is not Google-able. Collective memory is that he
"just" peed in a girl's mouth.
To be fair, I teach 20-year-olds at Columbia. Ignorance is nothing to
be ashamed of. Nobody knows everything. A lot of art, great art, is
made by despicable people. James Brown beat his wife. People are
always, "Why aren't you upset about Led Zeppelin?" I got the Bonham
three rings [tattooed] on my foot. Led Zeppelin did disgusting things. I
read Hammer of the Gods, I'm disgusted by the group sex with the
shark. [Note: it was actually a red snapper! Still gross.] I have a
couple of responses to that: I didn't cover Led Zeppelin. If I was on the
plane, like Cameron Crowe was, I would have written about those
things if I saw them.
The art very rarely talks about these things. There are not pro-rape
Led Zeppelin songs. There are not pro-wife-beating James Brown
songs. I think in the history of rock 'n' roll, rock music, or pop culture
people misbehaving and behaving badly sexually with young women,
rare is the amount of evidence compiled against anyone apart from R.
Kelly. Dozens of girls -- not one, not two, dozens -- with harrowing
lawsuits. The videotapes -- and not just one videotape, numerous
videotapes. And not Tommy Lee/Pam Anderson, Kardashian fun video.
You watch the video for which he was indicted and there is the
disembodied look of the rape victim. He orders her to call him Daddy. He
urinates in her mouth and instructs her at great length on how to
position herself to receive his "gift." It's a rape that you're watching.
So we're not talking about rock-star misbehavior, which men or
women can do. We're talking about predatory behavior. Their lives
were ruined. Read the lawsuits!
And there was a young woman who was pressured into an
abortion?
That he paid for. There was a young woman that he picked up on the
evening of her prom. The relationship lasted a year and a half or two
years. Impregnated her, paid for her abortion, had his goons drive her.
None of which she wanted. She sued him. The saddest fact I've learned
is: Nobody matters less to our society than young black women.
Nobody. They have any complaint about the way they are treated:
they are "bitches, hos, and gold diggers," plain and simple. Kelly never
misbehaved with a single white girl who sued him or that we know of.
Mark Anthony Neal, the African-American scholar, makes this point :
one white girl in Winnetka and the story would have been different.
No, it was young black girls and all of them settled. They settled
because they felt they could get no justice whatsoever. They didn't
have a chance.
And they learned that after putting these suits forth and
having them get nowhere? Do you think they didn't get
traction because of the representation they had, or Kelly's
power? Were certain elements in concert with that?
I think it was a lot of things, including the fact that Kelly was fully
capable of intimidating people. These girls feared for their lives. They
feared for the safety of their family. And these people talked to me
not because I'm super reporter -- we rang a lot of doorbells on the
south and west sides, and people were eager to talk about this guy,
because they wanted him to stop!
Going back a little bit to our original question. So, you get this
tape dropped in the mail...
Well, the tape came a year after we ran the first story. We ran this
story and the world shrugged. Associated Press picks it up: "Chicago
Sun-Times has reported a pattern of sexual predation of young
women by Robert Kelly," and everybody says, "Ah, well, OK." Then
one day I get this call that says: Go to your mailbox. There's this manila
envelope with a videotape in it.
We had gotten one videotape already after the first story, and we
gave it to the police. When I say "we," I mean a roomful of editors
sitting around asking: What is the right thing to do here? This would
seem to be evidence of a felony, we should give it to police. There
was one tape, but the police could not determine the girl's age. The
forensic experts they had looking at it said judging by the soles of her
feet, they could tell she was 13 or 14 at the time this tape was made,
but we can't identify who the woman is. Videotape number one.
There were tapes on the street. And I had heard of another video
tape with a girl who was part of an ongoing relationship. This is the girl
who was in the tape that was in the lawsuit.
And some 40-odd people testified that it was her?
Yeah. Coaches, best friend's parents, pastor, half the family,
grandmother, aunt -- but the mother and father never testified, the
girl never testified. When we wrote our story about the tape, the girl
and mother and father took a six-month vacation to the south of
France. We'd been to the house several times. We'd rung the doorbell.
This was an aluminum-siding, lower-middle-class house on the South
Side, with a station wagon which is 13 years old -- you know what I
mean? And now they're in the south of France. And one time the dad
got a credit as a bass player on an R. Kelly album. He didn't play bass.
The situations are incredibly complicated, and sometimes there is an
element of: We're gonna exploit this situation for our favor. That
doesn't mean that it's legal or it's right or that girl wasn't harmed. It
tore that family apart.
How many people do you think you've interviewed? How
many people came forward?
I think in the end there were two dozen women with various level of
details. Obviously the women who were part of the hundreds of
pages of lawsuits -- hell of a lot of details. There were girls who just
told one simple story, and there were a lot of girls who told stories
that lasted hours which still make me sick to my stomach. It never was
one girl on one tape. Or one girl and Aaliyah.
The other thing, the thing that people seem to not know:
She was fresh out of eighth grade in this tape.
Fourteen or fifteen. That puts a perspective on it. She's not
sophisticated enough to know what her kinks are.
Let's talk about what it is, aside from not just having
reportorial chops, that might hold somebody back. I feel that
a lot of younger journalists came up through blogs, not
journalism school. They are fearful to write about it because
they don't know what they can say, what language they can
use, if they can be sued for even acknowledging charges.
You may not know how to report, but you should know how to read.
The Sun-Times was never sued for the hundreds of thousands of
words that it wrote about R. Kelly. You cannot be sued for repeating
anything that is in a lawsuit. You cannot be sued for repeating anything
that was said during the six- or seven-week trial. It's in his record, and
then there's Kelly's own words. Then read [Kelly's biography]
Soulacoaster. It was not a pleasant experience for me to read
Soulacoaster! But read it, and read what he says in his own book! Do
your goddamn homework!
What are the other factors?
Here's the most sinister. This deeply troubles me: There's a very -- I
don't know what the percentage is -- some percentage of fans are
liking Kelly's music because they know. And that's really troublesome to
me. There is some sort of -- and this is tied up to complicated
questions of racism and sexism -- there is some sort of vicarious thrill
to seeing this guy play this character in these songs and knowing that
it's not just a character!
Songs like "Sexasaurus" kind of makes it novel. The ironic,
jokey Trapped in the Closet series airs on the Independent
Film Channel and features Will Oldham -- that has these
other hallmarks of "art" that read to a white, hipster, indie-
rock audience, then, because we are not taking certain
things seriously, we can choose not to take the lives of
these young black women seriously.
It puts it in the realm of camp or kitsch. If you have an emotional
reaction to a work of art and you use all your skills as a critic to back it
up with evidence and context. That's all we can ask of anybody. We're
all viewing art differently. The joy is in the conversation. Pitchfork is
the premier critical organ in the United States for smart discussion of
music, books, and artists, but it doesn't have this discussion. Reviews
his records but doesn't have the conversation about, "What does it say
for us to like his music?"
I think, again, everybody has to individually answer. I can still listen to Led
Zeppelin and take joy in Led Zeppelin or James Brown. I condemn the
things they did. I'm not reminded constantly in the art, because the art
is not about it. But if you're listening to "I want to marry you, pussy,"
and not realizing that he said that to Aaliyah, who was 14, and making
an album he named Age Ain't Nothing but a Number -- I had Aaliyah's
mother cry on my shoulder and say her daughter's life was ruined,
Aaliyah's life was never the same after that. That's not an experience
you've had. I'm not expecting you to feel the same way I do. But you
can look at this body of evidence. You, meaning everybody who cares!
You told me about the night after your critical review of R.
Kelly's performance at Pitchfork ran, one of these women
called you at 2 a.m.
This happens a lot. If you are a good reporter, you are accessible to
people and you cannot turn a story off. And that sucks! The number
of times since I began this R. Kelly story that I was called in the middle
of the night, was talking to someone on Christmas Eve or on New
Year's Day or Thanksgiving.... Yeah, I got a call from one of the women
after the Pitchfork festival review. "I know we haven't spoken in a
long time...," and said thank you for still caring and thank you for writing
this story, because nobody gives a shit.
It was a horrible day and a horrible couple of weeks when he was
acquitted. The women I heard from who I'd interviewed, women I'd
never interviewed who said, "I didn't come forward, I never spoke to
you before, I wish I had now that son of a bitch got off." Jesus Christ.
Rape-victim advocates -- I don't believe in God -- they do God's
work. These young women who volunteer to be in the emergency
room and sit with a woman throughout the horrible process, I don't do
that. I'm not saying I'm even in the same universe. But somebody calls
you up and says, I want to talk about this or thank you about writing
this, or, "I can't sleep because I'm haunted, can you hear what I want
to tell you?" We do that as a human being. I would like to forget about
this story. I'm not saying I'm Super Reporter. I'm saying this was a huge
story. Where was everybody else?
There is a disregard for your ongoing concern about this.
"Let this go, Jim. Get over it, Jim. He was acquitted." You
have never dropped this, and your peers are pissed because
it puts the rest of us over a barrel. I can speak to this, too.
It's often uncool to be the person who gives a shit.
"You're jealous of R. Kelly, you're trying to make your name off his
career."
Because you would love nothing more than to have to report
and carry these stories of rape.
Rapes, plural. It is on record. Rapes in the dozen. So stop hedging your
words and when you tell me what a brilliant ode to pussy Black Panties
is, then realize that the next sentence should say: "This, from a man
who has committed numerous rapes." The guy was a monster! Just
say it! We do have a justice system and he was acquitted. OK, fine.
And these other women took the civil-lawsuit route. He was tried on
very narrow grounds. He was tried on a 29-minute, 36-second
videotape. He was tried on trading child pornography. He was not tried
for rape. He was acquitted of making child pornography. He's never
been tried in court for rape, but look at the statistics. The numbers of
rapes that happened, the numbers of rapes that were reported, the
numbers of rapes that make it to court and then the conviction rate. I
mean, it comes down to something minuscule. He's never had his day in
court as a rapist. It's 15 years in the past now, but this record exists.
You have to make a choice, as a listener, if music matters to you as
more than mere entertainment. And you and I have spent our entire
lives with that conviction. This is not just entertainment, this is our
lifeblood. This matters.
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