Behind the Bastards - Part One: R. Kelly: His Life, Times & Vicious Sex Cult

Episode Date: January 8, 2019

Does R. Kelly Have A Sex Cult? In episode 42, Robert is joined by comedian Teresa Lee to discuss the life of R&B singer, R. Kelly.  Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse look like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Did you know Lance Bass is a Russian-trained astronaut?

That he went through training in a secret facility outside Moscow, hoping to become the youngest person to go to space? Well, I ought to know, because I'm Lance Bass. And I'm hosting a new podcast that tells my crazy story and an even crazier story about a Russian astronaut who found himself stuck in space. With no country to bring him down. With the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the Earth for 313 days that changed the world.

Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello friends, I'm Robert Evans, and this is once again Behind the Bastards, the show where we tell you everything you don't know about the very worst people in all of history. And today, we have a special guest who we will be talking about a special subject with the guest, not a bastard, is Teresa Lee. Hello, you don't know I could be a bastard. Well, I don't know. What is the technical definition like that?

You said no mom, no dad, no mom. What? Run away dads. Run away dads. Then you're a bastard, right? Yeah, if you're dad, you're a bastard. Yeah, if your dad's gone, yeah. Yes.

Yes. Many people don't use it for that anymore, really. I made a mistake of getting a bag of cookies right before the start, and I was like, I'll just snack, but you can't eat cookies on a podcast. You can't eat cookies on a podcast. You know what you can eat? Air. I was going to say the truth.

Oh yes, you can. Okay, great transition. Look at those transitions. Yeah, really great. Today, we're talking about someone who we will be catching some fire on Twitter for talking about. What do you know about R. Kelly? Well, I don't know. I think I know enough.

I know what was big news, but I never decided to open up the book and deep dive into R. Kelly. There may be things that are surprising to me, but I will say just before this podcast, I was like, let me look at all his songs again just to remind myself, and I forgot that he's saying the Space Jam song. I believe I can fly. Yeah, so now I'm rethinking playing that song in my head. Well, outside of that, were you ever a fan of his music? Do you remember any particular albums that like?

I never used to buy albums as a kid. So he was sort of in his heyday, his popular songs I would play and sing along to and dance to. But I wasn't a big album buyer until pretty much in the last couple of years, because I wasn't really allowed to as a kid. I would say, yeah, I have similar experience with him to wear like as a 90s kid. I heard a lot of R. Kelly songs on the radio. I liked, I did like a lot of his songs. I didn't ever attribute it to him.

It was one of those things where it's like, I like this new song. Oh, it's R. Kelly. But it wasn't like I stand for R. Kelly. He was just a big part of like the soundtrack of the late 90s and early aughts in particular. I like that. I'm a flirt song. I think, does he sing I'm in Love with the Bartender? No, that was definitely not right.

It's to T. Payne. That's right. Okay. But his era, he's around that era. I feel like the T. Payne songs were on the radio. R. Kelly songs were on the radio. Yeah. They're fun to grind to that sort of thing.

Definitely fun to grind to. I think he has a couple of songs with grind in the name. Yeah. So let's hear about the fact that he probably has a sex cult. Like he's the kind of a child pornographer, right? Isn't that a thing? People like know him for paying on people, but wasn't she also underage? We'll be getting into that.

It's actually very tough to answer that question definitively. Like it's one of those things like where pretty much everyone's like, yeah. But legally, he actually got off for that. Right. Because there's no proof. Wait, this does remind me real quick, speaking of R. Kelly, the song I'm a flirt when I was, I was technically underage, but nothing bad happened. But I was, I have to preface that so people don't get uncomfortable.

But that song, I remember I worked at a YMCA camp for a summer and I was like kind of talking to, in the way 17 year olds do a very innocently doing nothing, but to a, to like a 21 year old football player at Stanford. Stanford. Yeah. We grinded to that song. That's a fancy ass summer. But okay.

You grinded to I'm a flirt. Kind of contribute to R. Kelly because technically I was underage. I was 17 years old. So there you go. Yeah. I was kind of like, oh, R. Kelly. Hey, cool. Get over here and get, maybe put yourself in a questionable position.

Well, if I understand right, 17 is the age of consent for grind dancing. Yeah. He was respectful. I feel like it was, he was like, let's see how far you're go. And I will not push it. You know what I mean? Like I feel like he was like, I'm not going to push it. It's crazy that that's the bar for being a good guy.

I'm not going to push it with this teenager. He definitely didn't put a stop to it, but he went as far as I was comfortable and then did not push it further. I got to tell you, Teresa, as a man, it is so easy to be a good guy. Yeah. Cause it's just, it's just don't assault people. Like really, if you don't assault people, like I've done a lot of shitty things, but as long as I don't assault people or gaslight them, like I feel like I'm sailing.

I've gotten years without paying my taxes, but none of that matters because the bar is just below the floor these days. It's opposite for women. If you just start a sentence with I want, you're just automatically a bitch. Well, I mean, men never express their desires. Just not smiling. Sophie, would you get me a, a Celsius? I want a Celsius.

Double flip off. Well, we should probably get into the, uh, the story now. Yes. Yeah. Okay. But I'm sure there'll be a lot more fun conversations about gender politics to come. No more. I know that's what the audience really tunes in for.

Robert Sylvester Kelly was born in Chicago on January 8th, 1967. His dad was absent from the get-go and his mother, Joanne, raised him and his three siblings. She was a school teacher and a committed Baptist. Writing later in his autobiography, Sola Coaster. Kelly. Sorry. There's a little bit of pause. That's the name of his autobiography?

Yeah. His autobiography. Sola Coaster? Sola Coaster. Like a roller, exactly. A roller coaster of soul. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Well, you will be hearing that title regularly and it will never not make me die just a little bit inside. Just a little bit. But, and the thing that I hate to admit is I kind of like the layout of the book. Does it look like a roller coaster? No, no, no, it doesn't. It's just like, it's just neat.

I've never seen an autobiography. Like Kelly clearly. A lot of ups and downs? No, it's a lot of visuals. Oh. Like he put a lot of thought into how he laid out his autobiography. And it's one of those things. You get this throughout the story.

It sucks. Like it's when someone like Harvey Weinstein, who's like a piece of shit, but like I can't point to anything great he did. Like he's just a piece of shit who was tied to some good movies. R. Kelly is like a really good artist. Like he's one of these people. He's in like the running for the best R&B singer of all time. And he's like, he's legitimately talented.

So like as you go through, like as I'm reading his autobiography with its ridiculous, stupid name, I'm like, oh, well, this guy's got a really good talent for layout. And then I'm like, oh yeah. And he's molesting children. Oh, fucking Christ. It's frustrating. Yeah. I don't know.

Maybe it's not. But I mean, he probably, someone else probably laid it out. I don't know. I feel like he's, he's, he's that kind of. Artur. I think he's just too controlling to let someone else lay out his autobiography. But we'll get to that too. Anyway, I'm, we're a paragraph solo coaster.

Yeah. So in his autobiography, solo coaster, Kelly recalled that on the rare occasions he asked his mom what had happened to his dad. This was her response. Don't say nothing to me about that. No good son of a bitch because the minute he found out I was pregnant with you, his coward ass left disappeared in the wind, didn't want to have anything to do with either you or me.

Kelly goes on to write. I remember my mother's eyes on one of those days, close to blood red as the anger grew and grew while she talked about my father as if he was the devil himself. I remember my eyes getting baby blood red too because what my mother loved, I loved and what she hated, I hated. What's baby blood red? I don't know. That's not a color.

Baby blue is the color. Baby blood red. Baby blood. Well, I mean, maybe if you kill a lot of babies. Oh, there you go. Yeah. He's got babies on the mind. I mean, I imagine a baby's blood would be a different color because a baby has not been

subjected to all the same adulterers. They're not eating solid foods yet. Exactly. Okay. So maybe if you've seen a lot of baby blood, it sticks out. Go ahead. This is part of why I think he wrote it too. No ghost writer's going to be like, baby blood red.

That sounds like it came out of our Kelly's head. It was that day, that moment that I decided to hate my father, not knowing really what hate meant or having a clear understanding of love. She told me on that day, never to mention him again. I'm your mother and your father, she said. I promised her that I'd never talk about him again, and I never did, except for in his autobiography. Except for, yeah, clearly he hasn't pent that up or repressed any of that.

Yeah. Well, that's, that's his background. Robert Kelly grew up very poor, his family lived in the projects on the south side of Chicago, which according to the song Bad Bad Leroy Brown is the baddest part of town. In his autobiography, Kelly vaguely refers to his childhood home as being filled with numerous older women. It's unclear how many of them were related and how many of them were just around, but it seems weird.

It seems weird in Kelly's telling of it. When my mother wasn't around, the women ran a little freer. As I crept up an age, I found myself more curious and sometimes aroused, and I was ashamed of being aroused. He says he was eight when he first saw people having sex, and the story he tells is kind of baffling. He comes upon this couple getting it on, and they see him and basically give him the okay to watch, like look at him and, yeah.

On one occasion, I think later than this, he was handed a camera and asked by a couple having sex to take their pictures while they were having sex. He recalls that the photographic technology impressed me more than the sex. Maybe he's repressed some of that memory. That's sad. That makes me sad. Yeah, I know. Well, I mean, it's one of those things.

You got to start with, like, why do people do that? That's another thing with, like, Weinstein. I don't know enough about his, like, childhood to know, like, was he abused a bunch as a kid? Did that have an impact on it? Not that that mitigates bad behavior, because most people who are abused don't do anything. Right, because there's people who go both ways. But this makes you understand what comes next a lot better.

Sure. Like, this kid, he was never going to have an easy time coming up. Yeah, his barometer of what's appropriate and what's normal is off. Right from the get-go. Yeah. Age eight seems to have been a crowded hour for young Robert Kelly. It's the year when he first watched people fuck, first photographed people fucking, and it's also the year in which the love of his life died.

Oh. Yeah. Here is a quote from his autobiography, Solar Coaster. Okay. I love love. There's no one on earth more romantic than me. I've been in love with love ever since I can remember. I've always loved the idea of having a girlfriend.

I love the closeness, the sweetness, holding her hand, kissing her cheek, whispering words of affection and hearing her say that she feels the same about me. My first girlfriend was named Lulu, and she was so special. Though we were only eight and it was puppy love, I believe she was my first musical inspiration when it comes to love songs. So according to R. Kelly, Lulu died brutally that same year. When he was eight. At eight?

Yeah. They were out playing near the river and she fell in and bashed her skull open on some rocks. Oh, Jesus. Robert watched her die and was as traumatized as you'd expect. That's about the most traumatizing thing I can imagine happening to an eight-year-old. Wow. Yeah.

Yeah, it doesn't get much worse than that. There's like little foot seeing his mom die and having your eight-year-old girlfriend bash her skull in on some rocks and they're right up there. So this trauma was compounded several months later when Robert Kelly fell asleep in front of the TV and woke up from a, quote, crazy dream about three's company to find one of his older female relatives fondling him. Oh, no. Yeah, he's never given a name for this woman, but she appears to be someone who is still

around in his life. He has not told his other family members who this was, and when Chris Heath, a writer for GQ, interviewed him about this later, he said, quote, I remember it feeling weird. I remember feeling ashamed. I remember closing my eyes and keeping my hands over my eyes. I remember those things, but I couldn't judge it one way or the other fully. So Kelly says this mystery relative continued to molest him until he was roughly 15 years old.

She was not the only adult to go after child Robert a trusted male friend of the family once asked Kelly to masturbate in front of him. He offered to pay. Our Kelly later said it was a crazy weird experience, but not a full blown experience because it didn't go down. Contact sexual. No, a visual. Absolutely.

A visual from him showing me his penis and all that stuff, which is whether or not there's contact. Negotiating that's the thing that survivors do is like negotiating or maybe or thinking all this experience isn't valid because, because people have quote unquote worse. He didn't touch me. So it wasn't like it. I should be like these feelings maybe aren't valid, but they're all valid because as long as you cross the line, it's, you know, that's molestation and assault.

Yeah. If you're a child and an adult comes up to you, ask you to masturbate and pulls out his genitals. That's a sexual assault. Yeah. 100%. 100%. So he's got a rough upbringing and this is not all of it.

Robert Kelly was probably shot when he was 13. It's hard to know for sure what happened because he's not exactly a totally reliable narrator here. For years, he told interviewers he had been shot by thugs who wanted to steal his Huffy. In his autobiography, he claims the bullet was just a stray round from some gunfighter drive by though. One of his close associates apparently told the Chicago Sun Times that Robert shot himself during a botched suicide attempt.

This person says Kelly's version of the story is a lie invented to cover up the suicide attempt. Most reports say he has a bullet in his shoulder though, and if that's true, it does kind of make me think it was probably more likely a stray round than suicide, but I don't really know. We wouldn't shoot your shoulder. You definitely wouldn't shoot your shoulder. And it's very hard to miss a suicide unless you want to.

And even if you missed, it probably wouldn't be like a shoulder, like blow your jaw for something. I was like, I'll do it here where it doesn't hurt as much. Because Lil Wayne shot himself in like the back or something like that. What? Yeah. There was just a gun and a couch and he was playing with it. It was an accident.

Yeah. Yeah. It was an accident with him, I think. So hard to say, but it looks like he probably got shot too when he was 13, either a suicide or a attempt to just destroy a bullet because he lived in a rough part of town. Whatever the truth, it's really clear that Robert Kelly had a very, very rough childhood. Not an upbringing I would risk on anybody, but it was not all an R rated version of a Dickens novel.

He had a teacher, Linda McClinn, who recognized his nascent musical talent early on and nurtured it. She convinced him to sing Stevie Wonder's Ribbon in the Sky for a high school talent show. At least first performance in front of an audience. He said about it later, quote, that night it was like being Spider-Man being bit. I discovered this power. I knew I had something then. Miss McClinn got Kelly on TV for the first time, singing at a Christmas tree lighting

ceremony in Chicago. Now Robert had no head for math or reading and it actually sounds from what he says like he might be dyslexic. It sounds like McClinn was instrumental in convincing his mom and him that in essence he should throw all of his effort into singing, into performing, because that's the thing he was clearly best at. And that was definitely the right decision. Kelly started busking on a subway as a teenager.

On one particularly good day, he made $400. So he gets into performing and realizes like this is something he's got a crazy talent for. So as a young adult, he began booking more formal gigs and it was during one set at a backyard barbecue at age 24 that R Kelly was first discovered by the industry. Queen Williams, who worked for Jive Records, just happened to be at that barbecue. I was inside the house and Robert was performing outside. I saw this guy who had all the steps down, real choreographed.

You could tell he put a lot into it, which is something you don't usually see, especially at a backyard barbecue. It was the eye of the tiger. I'm not sure if he means that R Kelly was singing the eye of the tiger, or if he was responding more generally to like he was, maybe he was rising up to the challenge of his rival. R Kelly began working with Barry Hankerson, an agent with real standing in the music industry.

Hankerson got him signed with the band Public Announcement. Teresa, I'm going to show you a picture of the band Public Announcement. Oh, I can't wait. And I just want you to tell me what you know about their music based on this picture. That's a, it looked kind of almost like a boy band's stance, you know? Yeah. But there's a woman in the middle. There is a woman in the middle.

So it's a little off from that, but otherwise all of the guys look like boy band characters. Yeah, I imagine there's some dancing involved. And very 90s. A hair, like, tear touching, slicking back, kind of like nodding at the camera and pointing, that sort of thing. And R Kelly is wearing what looks like the 90s'est windbreaker that has ever been purchased. God, windbreakers. Those were.

Windbreakers, yeah. He was on the cutting edge of that windbreaker trend. Anyway, they dropped an album and it did pretty well, but Kelly almost immediately outgrew Public Announcement. He released his- Windbreaker. And the windbreaker. I mean, we all kind of outgrew the windbreaker.

He released his first solo album, 12 Play, in 1993. Wondering what the name 12 Play means? Yeah, it definitely isn't alluding to his, his, uh, challenge. Oh, geez. That's even dark. That's really dark. I don't know. What does it mean?

Tell me what it means. That's what I thought of first. I mean, it's still messed up. According to the Chicago SunTimes, quote, it's because Kelly, quote, claims that while other lovers might give you four play, he gives you three times more. That's just like, okay. All right. I mean, that's fun.

I mean, he's not good at math. So I mean, you gotta give it to him. He put math in his title. He nailed the math. Yeah, there you go. Especially for his first album, you know, you gotta conquer your fears. He has math and words mixed up. Tracks on the album 12 Play include such subtle titles as bump and grind, sex me, and this

is my favorite. I like the crotch on you. All right. You gotta love how just like, okay, you're really not hiding anything there, buddy. Like I like the crotch on you. The crotch is not a sexy word. It's not. It almost like, I feel like crotch just sound, I don't know.

It sounds like it's like, like, it's not, I don't relate it to sex, even though it's pointing to your genitals. I relate it to like, I don't know what I relate to, just like, I would think of jeans because of crotch, but I think of like dirty jeans and like someone who didn't do their laundry. That's what I think of when I think of crotch. No couple in the throes of passion have ever said, bring that crotch on over here. That would not, it's just not an attractive word.

Yeah. It's like something a tailor tells you about the crotch of your jeans or something. Yeah, you're right. Okay. So ridiculous as it sounded, 12 Play became the number one R&B album in America for nine straight weeks. Wow. Huge success.

Yeah, apparently a great R&B album. And this is a solo album. Yeah, this is a solo album. I don't know much about R&B, but one thing pretty much everybody seems in agreement on is that at his stride, R. Kelly was a hell of an R&B singer. So his career exploded after 12 Play came out. He owed much of his success to his agent, of course, Barry Hankerson. And it just so happens that Mr. Hankerson had a niece, a 15 year old girl named Aliyah

Dana Houghton. She had musical ambitions, a buttload of talent. Aliyah? Aliyah? Yep. Oh, wow. Yeah, this is that Aliyah. She soon started working with her uncle's top musician, the incredibly talented Robert

Kelly. He wrote a number of songs for her and acted as a producer on her first album, Age Ain't Nothing but a Number. Kelly wrote that title too. Yeah, I'm not surprised. Yeah. In interviews at the time, Aliyah talked about the many, many long hours she and R. Kelly put in together to make the album.

They're both perfectionists and this led to numerous late nights spent in close proximity. The album was a hit, selling more than 3 million copies and according to some people who know shit about R&B, it was revolutionary in a number of ways in that genre. I can't comment on that, but that seems to be the consensus. However good the album was, it also led to something even less savory or I guess exactly as unsavory as that title would suggest. Almost immediately after the album dropped, Robert and Aliyah were married at that most stereotypically romantic of destinations, the Sheraton Gateway Suites and Rosemary.

Wait, they got married? Yeah, they sure did. She was 15, he was 27. Oh my God. Yeah, that's not okay. What? That's not okay. I don't remember this.

I don't think we're being proved to be like, I'm fine with someone dropping a song called I like the crotch on you, you know, that's your own thing. Here we've got something not okay. Were they married for a long time? No. Okay, because I was like, I do not remember this. How was this not the thing that made him, because he wasn't big enough? He was pretty big, but not like.

This was big news. Okay. There was like a controversy over this that extends to today because again, Aliyah was 15 and that's a foul word. You can't be a 27 year old married a 15 year old. It's not legal. So sometimes in a lot of states you can actually marry at that age, but your family has to consent and Aliyah's family had no idea any of this was happening.

In fact, the wedding was a secret. The world only found out about it because several months after the fact Vibe published the marriage certificate, which listed Aliyah as 18, so fraudulent marriage certificate. Oh no. Big problems. Now, the whole episode is somewhat murky and unclear and there are a number of different narratives as to what precisely went down. GQ's account of things is based heavily on the memory of Demetrius Smith, a somewhat

shady character who worked for Kelly at the time. He said this, quote, the week of the marriage Smith recounts being in Miami on tour with Kelly and how Kelly explained that he had received a distraught phone call from Aliyah saying she had run away from home believing she was pregnant. Smith says that Kelly was then given some specious advice that he could protect himself from the legal ramifications of the situation by marrying her. This account of what happened next, during a break in the tour, Smith and Kelly flew together to Illinois.

Smith procured a fake state ID for Aliyah from a friend in the public aid office and they got a backup ID through someone they knew at Federal Express. That night, after the ceremony and a suite at the Sheraton Hotel, Kelly and Smith flew back to Miami to resume the tour. So they were trying to do the paperwork by getting married to make it legal, but then they used fraudulent IDs so it's the whole thing isn't legal. So what's the point of that? I mean, a couple of things.

Number one, keeping your head this before the internet. So the odds that someone would find this were lower. But if the marriage is null, if it was built on fake, yeah, so that makes no sense at all. The whole thing is null. They were hoping nobody would notice. Oh God. When did she come out with, are you that somebody? Because there's tons of random baby noises in there that I'm like, what the fuck is this?

And it's kind of just part of it, but now I'm like, was it a secret message? Like, was she like, I'm pregnant? She might have been. I think that was after this though. She was a lot older, I feel like. Because if that wasn't from her, she lived until like 24. So if that wasn't her first album, that's not on A.J. Nothing but a number.

No, that was with Romeo. I think it was the movie Romeo Must Die. Oh, then yeah, that would have been way later. So she was sort of trying to slip in the story of her. It's hard to say what happened. I've been born child. This is just one guy's relation. Well, she didn't have the baby, right?

I don't think so. No, no, she did not. And we don't know if she was actually pregnant. Again, this is like one person's version of the story. Yeah, I don't know if this guy's reliable. Yeah, and we don't really know 100% what went down because there were, you know, Aliyah's parents found out and made them, you know, they annulled the marriage and everything. And there was like a big legal settlement where he reportedly paid like $100 is like

a token thing. And then like they both agreed not to say anything about this. And like no one said anything about it in the year since. So we don't know what went down, but what I do know is that there are some fine products and or services that Teresa, you're just going to love to hear about. Oh, I love the ad reads. Yes. And during the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated

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world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. The wrongly convicted pay a horrific price.

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podcasts. We're back. We're talking about Aliyah and R. Kelly's very short lived in super illegal marriage. Literally, she was short lived. Well, yeah, she died in a plane crash when she was like twenty-some. Anyway, the settlement between Aliyah and R. Kelly. We don't know exactly what went down, but it's supposedly included a promise from Aliyah not to sue R. Kelly in the future due to, quote, emotional distress caused by any aspect

of her business or personal relationship with Robert. She also agreed not to sue for, quote, physical injury or emotional pain and suffering arising from any assault or battery perpetrated by Robert against a person. What? So again, we don't know what went down. We don't know what all was getting bandied about. It's like he was like, it's pre-Me Too, but like he already knew. It's like he was like, okay, this kind of shit will come out later.

So I'm just going to totally cover my bases. Well, it's not even like pre-Me Too. Me Too is just people finally getting angry about this. This whole thing where like rich people. Well, it's always been happening. Exactly. But like the NDAs were more like, oh, I feel like it came from a lot of the men who make people say or silence women.

A lot of it in the past came from like, oh, I don't want it to hurt my reputation. But the fact that he was already like, I know that you're going to go through emotional trauma that might not surface until 10 years from now. And then you might want to talk about it. He's like, hold up, you don't know you're going to have this, but I know because I've been through it. So don't talk about it. Oh shit.

Okay. Now that's a really interesting. I feel like he probably went through it. And that's why he knows that there's going to be. And then in the past, we're like, you're going to have emotional trauma. I think they're just like, I don't want to get caught. I didn't even catch that, but I think you're right. Yeah.

That's really insightful. It's kind of dark. I mean, it's, it's both sad because it's like he's a victim or survivor himself, but also, you know, there's a cycle and he's perpetuating it. Yeah. I think you're, I think you're really onto something there. So neither R. Kelly nor Aliyah have ever provided more detail about what went down or the reasoning behind that weird settlement in 1997, Aliyah filed to expunge the marriage certificate

from the county court records. The most detail she ever gave in an interview was with the Chicago Sun Times in 1994 where she said, Hey, don't believe all that mess. We're close and people took it the wrong way. But that was again, like right when it happened, Aliyah died in a plane crash in 2001 at the age of 24. R. Kelly has said almost nothing about her in the two decades since her death. He doesn't even mention her name once in his autobiography, Sola Coaster.

There is however, a disclaimer at the beginning that notes certain episodes could not be included for complicated reasons. That's probably a reference to the court settlement. During that 2016 interview with GQ, Kelly described Aliyah as his best best best friend, which seems odd for someone he left out of his autobiography. But again, probably was legally restricted from doing so. In 1995, R. Kelly released his second solo album, just titled R. Kelly. Three songs on the album reached number one on the R&B charts.

Song titles include Down Low, Nobody Has to Know. On December 24th, 1996, R. Kelly was sued for $10 million by Tiffany Hawkins, a high school student with ambitions for a music career. She claims she met Kelly when he talked to her choir class. Her teacher, Ms. McGlynn, loved having Kelly come over to talk to her new students. Kelly seemed to have loved flirting with the literal children in these classes. I'm going to quote Jim Derogatis, the indispensable reporter on the R. Kelly allegations here. I'm going to probably butcher this guy's last name, but like, how do you think that, Derogatis?

Derogatis? Yeah, maybe Derogatis? Derogatis? Derogatis? Derogatis. Derogatis. Sounds right. Derogatis.

That's what we're going to land on. Probably should have checked that when I was reading about R. Kelly for 11 hours. Quote, asked about the charges in the Hawkins lawsuit that Kelly had sexual relationships with some of the freshman and sophomore girls from McGlynn's choir. The teacher says, I don't know what he did outside of school, but in the school, there was no hanky-panky. If they were involved in that, the sad thing is, it takes two to tango. Oh no, this teacher is no bueno.

It doesn't take two. You're not a full person if you're underage. Yeah, you're really not. You can't be part of it too when you're not a full going adult. You teach teenagers. You know they're not real people yet. You know that. You teach them.

It's like if you put a puppy in a box and you're like, well, he didn't get out. It's like, well, that's different. You have more power. You're a big person. Hawkins claimed her sexual relationship with Kelly started in 1991 when she was 15 and he 24. She says Kelly ended the relationship when she turned 18. Hawkins slit her wrists immediately afterwards, a suicide attempt that she thankfully survived.

Also in 1996, while Kelly was settling the lawsuit over the teenager, he allegedly molested into a suicide attempt, he met an adult lady, Andrea Lee. Lee was a choreographer and a dancer who'd worked on his tour. Andrea and Robert married and eventually had three children. There are a few signs that the marriage was something less than super romantic. The pair were almost never photographed together. People close to Kelly told the Chicago Sun Times that Andrea was required to knock before entering any room in their house while her husband was home and in 2003, several of Andrea's

relatives complained to the Chicago Sun Times that they weren't allowed to visit their daughter at the home she shared with Kelly or talk to her on the phone. So consider that whole paragraph. Just tea and see a bit of foreshadowing. What does he say in his autobiography better? A little later in 1996, which was a very full year for our Kelly, he ran into legal trouble again when he was arrested for battery in Lafayette, Louisiana after a fight between himself, his entourage and three random dudes at the basketball court for a local gym.

Now he gets a pass on this one from me because why would you go to a gym basketball court if you didn't want to get into a fist fight with somebody in their entourage? True. What happens on the court stays on. Nope. That's probably not true. No, it is. If there's one thing gym basketball courts are for, it's fist fights with famous people

and that's a sacred, that's a sacred thing. I would say as long as you, I mean to a certain degree, you don't want to like beat someone's face to a pulp, but if there's a little bit of fighting on it, like if it's more like closer to wrestling on any court of sport, as long as when the game ends, you're shaking hands, patting each other's back and saying, good game, then I think it's a little okay. But I think if that's real aggression that's carried on past the game, then you're like, oh, that was a real fight. I think it all depends on whether or not someone has an entourage because if there's an entourage,

there's no option but to have like a really showy, choreographed fist fight. It's like a game. I don't really have the big old West Side Story gangs the way I don't even know if they ever really did do those dancey fights, but now I feel like you got fight on the court. I imagine if I ever got into a fight with Aston Kutcher, you would have a dancing and singing entourage that I would have to fight my way through first. But yeah, despite all of its ups and mostly downs, 1996 ended on a high note for Robert Kelly.

The movie Space Jam was released in December of that year, permanently delighting my former boss, Daniel O'Brien, and making R. Kelly a household name. His hit song, I Believe I Can Fly, was basically everywhere for like six months. It was the number two song in America. I was like eight at the time and a tremendous number of my early memories involved hearing R. Kelly's voice over the shitty speakers at a blockbuster or a Pigley Wiggly or what have you. Also a bad man, Michael Jordan.

Well, I don't know much about Michael Jordan to be honest. Not as bad, but not a nice guy. No comment until I do the digging on him for the Michael Jordan episode. Kelly's mother died in March of 1997. This was a devastating blow to the self-described mama's boy as it would have been for anyone. Shortly after this, Robert announced on stage with a gospel preacher that he had given himself over to Jesus. His autobiography contains numerous religious references.

He's been very consistent about the importance of faith to him over the years. Yeah, R. Kelly's desire to get right with God, however, did not inspire him to get right with the Justice Department. In June 1997, he missed his key ring on the battery case over that basketball court fight. He wound up having to settle out a court with the men for an undisclosed sum the next month. Settling with people for undisclosed sums of money would grow to become R. Kelly's number one hobby over the next 20 years. In 1998, he settled his lawsuit with Tiffany Hawkins, reportedly for $250,000.

The settlement came four days after Hawkins delivered a horrifying seven hour deposition. In a way, it was too little too late. News of Kelly's escapades with Hawkins began to leak. A young woman who'd been prepared to testify about being in the threesome with Hawkins and Kelly while Hawkins was underage told the Chicago Suntimes, quote, I'm not trying to down him because I honestly think it has to be a sickness. Looking at pictures of me and Tiffany when we were freshmen, boy, we were ugly little girls compared to what he could have had.

So I didn't understand why he did what he did. Oh, that's also like a sad sort of trying to justify and make things feel normal. Like as a survivor, I feel like she's also like trying to explain or, you know, make it move on without being stuck in the moment. Yeah, I'm not going to I'm not going to judge her for that. But it is weird. Yeah, that's hard. Yeah.

That whole article was published in 2000. It includes a lot of really unsettling information, quote, according to Hawkins's lawsuit, Kelly had sex with underage girls in his apartments at 9S Wabash, 185 North Harbor Drive and other locations in Chicago. In response to questions from Hawkins's attorneys, Kelly admitted that he employed Hawkins as a background vocalist and periodically gave her small cash gifts and approximately $1,400 in checks. But he denied having any sexual contact with the girl.

Now Hawkins's friend who was prepared to testify did make it clear that R. Kelly did not force himself on her sexually. He treated us very well. She said, we got anything we asked for, but we weren't going to ask for much. A pair of Air Jordans or $100 was a lot of money to us. I still love R. Kelly's music. I don't hate him. She added.

He reminds me of a boyfriend who hurt you that you still love. He hurt me by not helping me out and telling me to drop out of school. He told me and Tiffany both, if you want to be serious about the music, you have to be at the studio and not at school because school isn't going to make you a millionaire. At 16, that's like a dream to us to work with R. Kelly. So we listened to him. I think it's a sickness. Yeah.

I mean, that's rough. She's definitely negotiating with herself and there's no right or wrong from a survivor's point of view because it's like how she feels is how she feels and sometimes to move on, you have to, the narrative in her head, it doesn't mean it's wrong. You know what I mean? Clearly, he crossed a line from an objective point of view, but from her point of view, I don't think we could fault her for wanting to think of him fondly because otherwise just to move on with her life feeling like this bad thing happened, which it did, but it's

okay if she wants to live her life feeling a little bit more normal. And it's also, the bargain he put these young women in was essentially the way he was making the thing of it is like, okay, parts of this may be creepy. I may not like parts of this, but like. Other parts are to her good. Well, yeah, I'll get to be a millionaire. Even if she felt like she consented or maybe he didn't ever, maybe he didn't ever quote unquote force himself, but just by nature of him being an adult and them being kids.

And him treating them that way already, he's like grooming them to feel like they owe him. I would argue that even if they'd both been 18, the money here would have been an element of force. It's uneven, yeah. Not that he was offering them, but because. It's coercion. Yeah, it's coercion of like, if I put up with this for a while, then I'll have a career in the music industry and I'll never have to worry again, you know?

He was definitely abusing his power. Yeah. Yeah. In a couple of ways, like his power as like an older man who's wiser in the world than these 15 year olds and his power as a gatekeeper to celebrity. But there's also like, there's so much new, I mean, bottom line, it's wrong. You know, he crossed the line, bottom line that was, I want to preface that, but I also want to, the nuance of like someone, he was a survivor as a kid and part of him, maybe

that like the part that, you know, he never dealt with maybe wanted to rewrite a little bit. But he did treat them really well and didn't force them in a, in a way to kind of rewrite like what if when this happened to me, it was sweet and kind and they didn't force it. So in a way, he may have been trying to rewrite his own past that way, still bottom line wrong. And there should have been more resources in place to help him get through his trauma so that he knew how to properly deal with it. But there is a world where maybe like, maybe he thought treating them well and then going

to sex would kind of be like, oh, there can exist a relationship that's, cause he's trying to justify what happened to him. Yeah. He's not like most people who do really bad things. I doubt he's going into this was like, no, I think the way he wanted to sort of put some sort of meaning to what happened to him and make it feel like it wasn't so bad because in his mind, he's like, well, if I can have a relationship with kid that feels even or in his mind, it's even like they like this, then that can mean maybe when I was a kid,

it wasn't so bad. Yeah. Like he's trying to rewrite a little bit what happened. Yeah. I can see something like that going on in his head. I can see that being like a way to sort of deal with like crush your conscience a little bit as you start to be like, this is fucked up, what you're doing, Robert Kelly. To not feel so much shame about himself.

Yeah. Yeah. Or his actions in this particular instance. Well, let's read the next paragraph. In 2001, Tracy Sampson sued Robert Kelly for bringing her into an indecent sexual relationship when she was just 17. She claimed she was treated as his personal sex object and quote, he often tried to control every aspect of my life, including who I would see and where I would go.

Her case was settled out of court for an undisclosed sum. Kelly was sued in successive months in 2002, once in April and again in May by two different women. One claimed he impregnated her while she was underage. Another claimed he'd filmed a sex tape of them without her knowledge or consent. According to the BBC, quote, the recording was allegedly circulated on an R. Kelly sex tape sold by bootleggers under the title R. Kelly triple X. In both of these cases, R. Kelly settled out of court for undisclosed sums.

I feel like that song track should have been called ages, just an undisclosed sum. No, that's really good. That's really good. Both of these women found in DAs. I found a telling quote, though, from a BuzzFeed article that interviewed a lawyer who's been involved with several of R. Kelly's settlements. Chicago attorney Susan E. Loggins declined to say how many settlements she has negotiated with Kelly before lawsuits were ever filed, but she said they were numerous and recently

included one for a 17-year-old aspiring singer from Chicago's West Side who has said who has been part of Kelly's inner circle. So it seems like for every one of these cases I've read, there's many, many, many others that never proceeded to trial because the victim just went to Kelly straight away and they worked out a settlement. The people we're talking about on this are probably not the only people who could come forward with allegations if they hadn't already gotten paid and signed an NDA. It's like with a Weinstein thing.

Literally the month after those two cases, Robert Kelly was charged again, this time with filming illegal sex videos. This is the R. Kelly case you've all heard about, the P-tape, because the actress in this tape that was circulating underground was allegedly underage. Kelly was charged with 21 counts of making child pornography. So the backstory of this one is a little bit interesting, so we're going to peer back for a little bit to November of 2000, when Kelly released the album TP2 to a number one debut on the Billboard Albums chart.

It featured two number one R&B hits, I Wish and Fiesta. It also featured songs like The Greatest Sex and Feelin' On Your Booty. The album reviewer for the Chicago Suntimes was Jim DeRogatis. He wrote this about it. One minute he's grabbing his privates and bragging of being like a real freak, the next he's drawing on his gospel roots and once again paying homage to his dear departed mom on the lush and touching single I Wish. Prince, Marvin Gaye, and Al Green all showed that in the right circumstances, sex and prayer

can be the same thing. Kelly has yet to combine the two in one song, so he has yet to make the transcendent record he's been promising throughout his career. His lyrical shifts from church to street corner are still so jarring that they can give you whiplash. So you can tell there, DeRogatis hardly came into the Kelly case as a hater, but it was probably this review that would contain the seeds of Robert Kelly's downfall, or at least probable downfall.

One of our Kelly's assistants read the review and sent this letter to DeRogatis. You wrote about our Kelly and compared him to Marvin Gaye. Well I guess Marvin Gaye had problems too, but I don't think they were like Robert's. Robert's problem is young girls. I've known Robert for many years and I've tried to get him to get help, but he just won't do it. So I'm telling you about it, hoping that you or someone at your newspaper will write an article about it and then Robert will have no choice but to get help and to stop hurting

people he's hurting. This is his assistant? This is one of his assistants. Yeah. We will talk about what comes this later, but before we get back to the R. Kelly sex tape, you know what's better than a sex tape that is probable child pornography? This is not a good ad to look, oh boy, we're spiraling. Anything?

Anything. Celsius, the only energy drink currently on this table that's also not involved at all in our Kelly's sex crimes, alleged sex crimes. Here's some other ads that paid us. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations and you know what, they were right. I'm Trevor Aronson and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI, sometimes you got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy.

Next season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy voiced, cigar smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. He's a shark. And on the gun badass way, nasty sharks. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying

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stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991 and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts.

What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman.

Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus? It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. We're back and we've just been slammed into our first free, real ad of the day for Diet

Mountain Dew, the only caffeinated beverage currently in my hand because I didn't want to make another coffee. Why are you holding a skateboard? Because of radical... Do the sound of a half pipe. I thought you were going to say do the sound of a hang loose. No, there's no sound of that. You just got to put it in your voice.

I can hear it when you do the hand gestures. You're hanging loose. There's no way to do that sign without sticking your tongue out. No, there's not. It just happens. No, it's required. It's the law. Speaking of the law, let's talk about R. Kelly's 21 Charges of Child Pornography making.

When we last left off, Jim DeRogatis, who I will be pronouncing differently almost every time we talk about him, reporter at the Chicago Sun Times had just gotten an anonymous letter from one of Kelly's assistants being like, are Kelly's got a real problem with young people and somebody needs to do something about this? So as a journalist, getting a letter like that is a legally prickly thing. Anytime you're considering breaking a story that would accuse someone of multiple felonies, you've got to be on guard. A letter like that on its own is not superjournalistically actionable.

Running the letter alone would not be the best practice. So nothing happened at first. This may have prompted the person in Kelly's orbit to push again. A videotape was sent to the Chicago Sun Times by some anonymous person. The tape showed Kelly having sex with an extremely young person because this was super likely to be evidence of a crime. And because if it was evidence of a crime, it would also be child pornography, the Chicago Sun Times went to the cops.

The police could not... Because how... Isn't that... If you even look at it... Yeah. So if you get sent a video like that, you have to call the feds. Yeah. You have to immediately bring in the...

So terrifying. Well, I think they go to the local police. Sure. They go to the feds. They go to the cops. I don't trust local cops. Certainly not with child porn. But the police opened up an investigation, but there really wasn't much that they could

do because they didn't have... They didn't... You don't know the age of the person. You don't know for sure that this is our Kelly. You just have these claims. So they kind of wait for a little while and somehow, right around this time, tapes of our Kelly, bootleg sex tapes of our Kelly with young women start floating around. There's multiple tapes.

They are not all underage people. Kelly apparently has sex taped, his sex taped regularly. So somebody in his orbit was leaking these, not just to the press. I have not watched the R. Kelly p-tape, but this is when the R. Kelly p-tape that's famous gets out into the world. So people were watching... Because I remember hearing the news and I guess people... So people were watching it, but if you watch it, isn't that...

They weren't all child pornography. Okay. But it wasn't that I don't know much. I just remember... I didn't even know she was underage. I just remember there was a p-tape and then there was like a dungeon. Yeah. Yeah.

That's part of his house and stuff. Yeah. Okay. So whoever started sending these anonymous tapes to the Sun Times eventually got fed up that nothing had happened yet. This person left another video in Jim DeRuggett, his mailbox. He sent it to the police as well and they were finally able to make an ID. They found a source who claimed to recognize the young women in the video as her niece.

She basically was able to name the kid and Kelly says the first name in the video so the police were pretty sure that they had the right person. And so the cops give the Chicago Sun Times the go-ahead to publish their first story on the matter. That's terrifying. I mean, I know they're just investigating. They have to do their job, but that's terrifying to have to like... Your sex tape is not only getting leaked, but then people are like, do you know this girl

and like asking your family members? Well, they weren't going straight to Kelly at first. No, they weren't they asking... She recognized the girl as her niece. Yeah, they found... So that means her under uncle watched the sex tape to identify her. They probably saved it, like had just a clip of the girl's face or something. I doubt they played the whole tape for this lady, but like they heard her first name and

I think they narrowed it down because they had some... They feel like they have enough that the police charge him with 21 counts of child pornographizing. Because the aunt of this girl claims she would have been around 14 at the time of the filming. So our Kelly, who had just performed at the opening ceremony of the Winter Olympics, was forced to respond personally. Quote, it's not true, all I know is this, I have a few people in the past that I fired, people that I thought were my friends, that's not my friends. It's crap and that's who we're going to treat it.

The reason these things are happening I really do believe is because of the fact that I didn't fall back as far as blackmail was concerned. I didn't give them any money. So our Kelly was indicted for child porn on June 5th, 2002. He pled not guilty the next day and posted bail, using $750 bills. Since he got back from court, he immediately violated a court order by singing at a kindergarten graduation ceremony. Wait, $700, like single-dollar bills, is that what you're saying?

No, $100 bills. Oh, I was like, what? He just has to be a petty, like why? No, he just had a shitload of cash on the ground. Okay, $100 bills, okay, that makes sense. So at this point, the grinding wheels of the justice system set into motion. Jury selection did not begin until June of 2008, six years after the charges were filed. This is not normal.

Wow. This is the article pointed out at the time, quote, In the last six years, Michael Jackson was charged, tried and acquitted of molestation. Phil Spector was charged and tried for murder. And due to a mistrial, he'll have to do it all again. Lil Kim was charged, tried and convicted of a conspiracy and perjury, and she even found time to shoot a reality show while she served her sentence. So all that happened while our Kelly's case was waiting to actually go to trial.

Now delaying this case was very definitely a strategy used by our Kelly's defense. They probably figured that since his alleged victim was expected to take the stand, it would be better optics if she were in her 20s rather than still a teenager when she had to do it. So first off, they waived Kelly's right to a speedy trial, which would have required the case to take place in four months or the charges would have to be dropped. They also filed 30 some odd pretrial motions, all of which demanded a response from the prosecution and usually led to an argument in court. This always delayed things further.

There were also some free cappings that disrupted matters. The judge fell off a ladder and injured himself. Our Kelly's appendix burst, finished lawyer died, fell off a ladder. There's some weirdness around the judge in this case. We'll get to some more of that later. During the six years while he waited, Robert did not exactly shut up and just sort of hunker down. Like a month after the charges were filed, he released a single, Heaven I Need a Hug,

which was basically his plea of innocent in the court of public opinion. Here are some lines from Heaven I Need a Hug. And as for Robert, here's what I need to do. Get rid of them clowns and get myself a whole other crew. Media do your job, but please just don't make my job so hard. Somebody please pray what I'm talking about. I'm still young trying to figure it all out. Heaven I Need a Hug.

Is there anybody out there willing to embrace a thug? So yeah, he needs a hug. He's using his music as a way to get people to get on his side. It's a powerful tool. The question of his guilt or innocence is actually a semi-regular theme in R. Kelly's music. For example, in the album Chocolate Factory, during a 10 minute mini opera, R. Kelly finds himself at the gates of Heaven.

St. Peter denies him for his sins, but then Jesus absolves him. The same scene apparently plays out in the album Love Land as well, in the middle of a 20 minute remix of I Believe I Can Fly. His career continued to chug along in the early aughts, but even his work wasn't free of drama. In October of 2004, he and Jay-Z released their second collaborative album, which did predictably well. They started touring together and things were not smooth.

During a performance in St. Louis, on October 23rd, Kelly left the show after getting into a screaming argument with the lighting technicians. He actually left the venue, drove to a random McDonald's, and spent hours serving food to customers through the drive-thru window. What? Yeah. With Chicago, sometimes his coverage sheds a little light on how Kelly's people spun this.

It's fucking weird. Kelly's attorney, Ed Ginson, confirmed reports Monday that Kelly headed from St. Louis' Savva Center to a McDonald's restaurant that had closed, but which he persuaded to re-open for the entourage traveling on his bus. Then he decided he wanted to work the drive-thru, Ginson said. It was on the radio. People were running out of their houses to have our Kelly serve them. Kelly is a big McDonald's fan who has stopped and worked at the drive-thru windows of McDonald's

restaurants before. In a primetime live interview that aired in October, he talked about frequent visits there with his late mother. We'd go to McDonald's almost every morning. She'd drink her cup of coffee. She'd wear this cheap lipstick, and she'd leave this red lipstick around the cup, Kelly said. Well, first of all, to McDonald's for being so big that that's not even a thing you associate

with McDonald's, it's just like going to the store. You know what I mean? To be like, he served people. If you were a small brand, and our Kelly just decided to work for you for a day, that would be the biggest thing that happened to you, but McDonald's is so big, you're just like, you don't even associate that with the brand. I feel like this has to have been a franchisee, though, because I feel like McDonald's corporate, if they've been asked, should we have this guy who's being indicted for child pornography

working our drive-thru window? I feel like the CEO. Well, he has a lot to go in to eat. Well, yeah, but I feel like Ronald McDonald would probably be like, yeah, we don't want that guy to work in the window. Yeah, we don't want. Right, right. But I'm going to guess.

The face of McDonald's. Yeah, it was some local franchise owner who was like, well, fuck this will be good business. McDonald's in St. Louis. Geez. Yeah. I feel like. Would you have gone if you were there at that time, knowing what was going on, but he's not found guilty yet as a normal person, then would you be like, I'm going to go get food

from the R. Kelly at the drive-thru? You know what? I'll say this. I'll say this. As someone who was born in St. Louis and who has been there a number of times in my life, if I was going to get handed French fries by a child pornographer, I would expect it to be at a McDonald's in St. Louis. Uh-huh.

That's the kind of thing. Looking back, I'm like, oh, I'm principal. I wouldn't want to do with him, but I'm like, if I was there at that time and someone was like, dude, R. Kelly is handing out burgers down the street. I mean, like, I'm going to be totally honest. I probably would drive through like, I don't like, I'm not saying that's the right thing to do and you can like, whatever come at me, but I'm being honest. I think I would have gone.

So okay. Let me, let me, let me pause at this to you. If like Mel Gibson gets caught. No, because I don't care about Mel Gibson. I don't like him. Okay. Would have to be someone you care about. No, I guess I don't care about R. Kelly.

Maybe the public opinion thing did make a difference. Him singing about himself. Cause I'm like, you know what I mean? Like he seems more human. I mean, he was super popular though too. I mean, already outside of all this. So I don't know. I think if it was someone like, okay, William Shatner is a famous person I love who I'm

sure has done horrible things that I just haven't heard about. He must have. I've never heard anything bad about him. Oh, he has to have. Look at it. Look into his eyes. But he just looks like a character actor who like plays that. I think he could be totally sweet.

We don't know. If, if any member of Hollywood has killed someone for money, it's Bill Shatner. Okay. I'm saying that right now. I have no evidence of this completely unsubstantiated. You heard it here first. If any A-list star is a hit man, it's, it's Bill Shatner in his younger days when he was a lumberjack.

He's just that classic Canadian stereotype of the lumberjack slash sniper. Would you get handed burgers by like a serial killer? No, but if like, I don't think I'd want to look at my face and I knew it. I think a lot of people would do it if Robert Durst was handing out burgers. No. People would go, but I don't think I would want to, I don't want a killer to look me in the eye ever because it's like, I don't know how they choose their victims.

Like if they know my face, I might be dead in 10. You know what I mean? Like, I don't know. Maybe one day they'll be like, I remember that face. Oh, just randomly. I'll just kill her. You know what I mean? I don't know.

Anyway, sorry for derailing. Is Nellie from St. Louis? What? Is Nellie from St. Louis? I have no idea. Anyway. Because he's from St. Louis. I just didn't give other artists from St. Louis.

Where I landed is if like, Bill Shatner was on trial for some terrible crime and he was on his way to court working at a McDonald's, I would try to get some McNuggets from William Shatner. You would. I would. I think I would. So yeah, that's your answer. I can see why people would do this.

So quite the digression. On October 29th, 2004, a few days after Kelly's night at McDonald's, our Kelly stopped a performance in Madison Square Garden saying a fan had waved a gun at him. He wound up in a fight backstage with one of Jay-Z's people and got pepper sprayed. He went to the hospital. There were a shitload of lawsuits and the two were collapsed in on itself. So on July 21st, 2005, during pretrial proceedings in Kelly's court case, a 21 year old woman testified that the girl in Kelly's sex tape was 14 when the video had been filmed, saying

it, quote, it was the summer after eighth grade. The judge did not consider, yeah, that's bad, right? Eighth grade sounds so much younger than 14. Yeah, 14 sounds, I mean, it's still bad, but eighth grade really drives it home. What's going on here? The judge did not consider this enough and threatened to toss out the court case unless a more affirmative ID could be made. Two months after this, Robert's wife, Andrea, filed for an order of protection against her

husband. She claimed that she had asked him for a divorce and he'd hit her. She rescinded the order shortly thereafter, but they went up getting a divorce in 2008. We'll hear from Andrea a little bit at the end of all this. Back in February of 2006, while everybody was still waiting for the Kelly trial to start, Robert Kelly's brother, Kerry, or Killa Kelly, came out with a DVD filled with allegations against his sibling. Among other things, yeah, Killa Kelly claims that R. Kelly offered him $50,000 in cash

and a record deal to pretend to be the man on the tape. He also alleged that his brother was abusive to his wife and had a problem with underage girls. None of that seems out of the pale. I will say that the credibility of Killa Kelly's allegations is somewhat put into question by the way that he chose to drop this bombshell. In a mixed tape. A DVD is not the most credible way to present allegations.

Was there a title page and bonus features? I couldn't find the title. I found it, it was published by Drama Magazine with an H in the word drama. So it's, again, I'm going to guess he got money for this. The H came before the D, so it's a hush drama. Drama. Yeah. So maybe it was all a cynical cash grab.

That said, it is consistent with all the other allegations that have been made and it wouldn't be the weirdest thing in the world if R. Kelly tried to have his brother take the fall form. Now even under the cloud of legal fuckery looming over him, Robert Kelly had continued to release albums that continue to be gigantic hits, and this is important to note, and part of why Kelly's fans defend him so vociferously. R. Kelly has been the biggest name in R&B throughout most of this. In May 2007, R. Kelly gave an interview to Hip Hop Soul magazine. In it he said, I'm the Ollie of today, I'm the Marvin Gaye of today, I'm the Bob Marley

of today, I'm the Martin Luther King, are all the other greats that have come before us, and a lot of people are starting to realize that now. In February of 2008, a couple months before jury selection began on the trial, Regina Daniel Daniels, Kelly's longtime spokeswoman and the person who'd officially denied the allegations of his wrongdoings to the press for like a decade, left his employee with her husband, George Daniels. In the interview, George explained, he crossed the line with my daughter. It didn't get to the extreme of that, the sex tape video, or else I wouldn't be here

if you know what I'm talking about. The reason I'm talking about this, it's not just for me, it's not just for my wife, it's not just for my daughter, but it's for other fathers and mothers because it doesn't have to be a superstar, it could be the dude on the corner. There are guys who sit around and give your child a couple bucks to go to school and then wait until they get a little older and then they set that trap. That's grooming. Yeah, yeah, that's grooming.

This is now, again, the husband and his spokeswoman, both of whom had worked for him coming out and saying this. A lot of people in his orbit have come out later with allegations. On June 14th, 2008, R. Kelly was found not guilty by a jury of his peers. The prosecution star witness, the woman in the tape, never took the stand. Jim DeRogatis, the Chicago SunTimes reporter who broke the story, took the fifth and did not testify. I think some of it is that he might have had to admit that he'd seen the tape, which

would have been legally scary, and he also had some worries that he would be required to give up sources and stuff like that, so he did not testify, which is always a fraught thing for a journalist in a court case. There's a lot of reasons that would be complicated. Four days later, Judge Gahn threw a post-trial party at a bar to celebrate the end of the case. He invited the defense, the prosecution, court workers, and reporters. One of those reporters...

Wait, is that a thing that people do? It happened this time? Is that typical, though? I've never heard of this before. So, like, invite, like, hey, guys, like, rap party and the people who are just yelling at each other. Everybody, prosecution, defense. Yeah, what the fuck?

Let's all get on. Get down. That's so bizarre. It's really weird. But one of the reporters who was present says that it was a hoot and that everyone there was loose and relaxed, so that's nice. Oh, you almost put me in jail. Let's all party together.

All right. I don't think R. Kelly went. What? I'm going to guess maybe that was the judge's hope that he'd get to party with R. Kelly. Weird. Again, there's some weirdness with the judge in this case. Wait, the judge threw it. Yeah.

Some weirdness. So, R. Kelly was not guilty. And if he were truly innocent of all of the allegations against him, this story might have ended there. But this is not the sort of podcast where we talk about wrongly accused people. So in the years since R. Kelly was declared not guilty, things have only gotten darker and a whole lot creepier. All of that will be coming to you, the listener, on Thursday when we drop part two of the working

title has been R. Kelly. What the hell, man? How you doing? I'm okay. I didn't realize that you were going to leave me on a cliffhanger, though. I'm going to leave you on a cliffhanger. So I'm not going to know that. That's when the air horn should have kicked in.

Thank you. I don't like the defense that people say of like, oh, well, great artist, blah, blah, we're here all the time, great artist, and what we're going to do, not give their art. Yeah, I think it would have helped public opinion if when someone's under trial for child pornography that they're forbidden to put out art, because then people can just, you know, fine, appreciate the stuff that came before, but like, we don't need to continue liking the guy. It might be true he's talented, but like, while you're under trial for something bad,

you shouldn't be allowed to put out any more of your art. That's a privilege. That's not a right. Well, I mean, when you're on trial, though, you're not guilty. Like you can't stop someone from putting out art when they're innocent until proven guilty. But I think like, because then it puts people in a position where it's like, well, that's so good. We should just listen to, well, why don't we just stop having it, then we don't have

to be like, it's so good and defending it. I think there's, you have some water when you're trying to like get people to be like, hey, this guy's been accused of a bunch of heinous crimes. Let's all boycott his music. I think that's fine, but I think like the government can't go and be like, you don't get to make music. Yeah, you're right. Because then when someone isn't guilty, they can, it can be used against them to silence

them. But that's pesky civil rights and shit. I don't know, man. I don't know. Justice. Woo. Teresa, you want to plug your plugables? Yeah, sure.

I've got a podcast. It's all about secrets. I've got to get you on sometime. I love secrets. You got any secrets? I got a ton of them. I feel like you're a very open book, but it doesn't have to be a scandalous secret. There's something you've not talked about, you know, on stage or whatever I already did

podcast about. It's called You Can Tell Me Anything. Comedians confess something they haven't told anyone. It's really fun. You can find it on Instagram at tellmeanythingpod. And I'm on Twitter at Larissa T. Yeah, I'll have to be on. I'll talk about the time I firebombed that oil derrick or something.

I'm Robert Evans. This has been Behind the Bastards. You can find us on Instagram and Twitter at atbastardspod and by shirts and cups and cell phone cases and commercial drilling equipment all at our T-public store. Behind the Bastards, T-public. Check it out. You can get our branded stuff on your MX80 Earthcore Cracker, which is one of the finest commercial drilling rigs available.

I shouldn't be lying about commercial drilling equipment. We're going to have like 30 people pop up on Twitter and be like, also you can get stickers. You can find me on Twitter at IWriteOK. You can find the sources for this episode on BehindTheBastards.com. We'll be back on Thursday with the story of R. Kelly's alleged sex cult. And until then, podcasts! Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests.

It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse look like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based

on actual science? And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest? I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your

podcast.