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

Episode Date: January 10, 2019

In Part Two, Robert is joined again by Teresa Lee to continue discussing 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. Today is part two of our epic two-parter on Robert Kelly. Better known as R. Kelly, the king, or at least like some level of baron of R&B. Duke, maybe? By count? Yeah, the squire. Squire? No, that's way too low.

Squire of R&B would be like, yeah, I don't know. I don't know enough about R&B to make this joke better. How are you doing today, Teresa? I'm okay. You're Teresa Lee. I am. You are my guest on the first episode. You're currently my guest on the second episode. Yes.

You are host of the podcast. You can tell me anything. I am. You are trying to get a word in edgewise as I talk over you like a man. No, not really. I was just agreeing to the things you said. Okay, I felt bad because I feel like I definitely interrupted you a couple of times there. No, I always look like I'm about to say something. That's true! That's so true!

I don't know why. I think it's because I try to seem attentive. You have resting insight face. I was told by my psychiatrist that I'm not particularly insightful. Not told, even in an evaluation. This is not a real digression. That's some shade. Quick sentence, but I took an ADHD test and then I got the whole evaluation and it lists everything, like, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and one of them says insight and just said,

not extraordinary. I said, a what? I'm insightful. I mean, I got similar feedback on a BNE. I was part of one. It's hurtful to hear that from an evaluation. From a clinical point of view. From a clinical evaluation of how good you are at breaking windows. Nobody likes to hear that.

All right. I'm not even going to ask for more information because I will just derail this conversation. Now, the behind the bastards on me is going to be a real great three-parter coming out someday when Sophie is taking a picture of us right now. Except I can't see the paint. Fantastic. All right. Let's get back into part two. Now, when we last left Robert Kelly, he had been declared not guilty by a jury of his peers

in a court of law. So that's, I mean, that's good for our Kelly. Let's hear about what happened next. Is it though? I mean, like, you know, he does need help. Yeah. I would say he would probably say that being declared not guilty of 21 counts of child pornography was a good thing for him. True. Or maybe this whole time he wanted to be caught. Or maybe the whole time he wanted to be caught.

Well, we'll see how you feel at the end of this. Okay. In March of 2011, Billboard magazine declared Robert Kelly the number one R&B artist of the last 25 years. Four years later, Billboard published another article, this one ranking the 35 best R&B artists of all time. They put R Kelly at number 15 right under Luther Vandross. I'm no expert on the genre, but whenever people talk about the goat in that particular type of music, R Kelly's name always seems to be in the running, you know? Over the course of his career, Kelly has sold more than 60 million albums,

which is an astonishing feat for any artist of any era in any genre of music. Now, whenever a famous person is accused of doing terrible things, some chunk of their fan base will inevitably rise to defend them. R Kelly fans have a reputation for being particularly devoted. Their defense of him is helped by the fact that he was declared not guilty in a court of law. But of course, that does not wipe away the numerous settled out of court lawsuits or the fact that he married a 15 year old, and 2008 did not put an end to the allegations against Kelly. We will be talking today about the numerous details that have come out about his life in the decades since his trial.

In July of 2011, the same year Billboard declared him the best R&B singer of the last quarter century, R Kelly went in for an emergency throat surgery. He wound up recovering enough that by the end of that year, he was out touring again, and it was on that tour at a party after a show in Dallas that R Kelly first met, Kitty Jones. Now, in 2017, Kitty was the subject of a blockbuster Rolling Stone article titled, Surviving R Kelly. It's one of the two major pieces on Kelly that's broken in the last year. The other was a Buzzfeed article written by Jim Duragatis,

formerly of the Chicago Sun-Times, eternally mispronounced by me. The title of Jim's article, Parents Told Police Their Daughter is being held against her will in R Kelly's cult, marks probably the strongest allegations made against the singer yet. So, he's now being accused of essentially running a sex cult. And that's what we'll be talking about today! Oh boy, can't wait! Just in time for the holidays! You know what, nothing goes better with my early January

as I'm struggling to get off those Christmas pounds, as I'm working to get back into the groove, you know, getting... Right, yeah, it's the new year. I just love listening to 45 minutes or so of detailed recitations of sex crimes. That really... It's a good way to kick off the year. Good way to kick off the year, good way to kick off the year. Sometimes I just look at pictures of John Wayne Gacy while I'm doing push-ups. That's not relevant, but... That's your goals?

Yeah, it's my vision board, it's just John Wayne Gacy. It's possible this podcast has done some damage to me. It's possible. Sophie's giving, you know, I think everyone can guess the looks Sophie's giving me. Let's move on. So, I'd like to start this episode by talking about Kitty's story, because it seems like what happened to her is emblematic of what happened and is still happening, allegedly, to a lot of other women.

And again, I have tried to be good about putting in allegedly here. This is all alleged. None of this has been proven in a court of law. There's a lot of evidence, but again, allegedly. Add that in your head if I forget to drop it in at some point. So, Kitty Jones says that she and R. Kelly hit it off at this party after his show. He invited her to hang out with him on the next stop of the tour and then handed her a piece of paper with his phone number on it. He told her to text him. When she did, he instructed her to always call him Daddy.

Next, he texted her, Sin Pick, which she did. And like that, they were off. He flew her out to Denver, and here's the Rolling Stone. The Rolling Stone. Here's Rolling Stone. Oh, it's like what it was. It's Mick Jagger. He's really been the point man on this story. Here's Rolling Stone. I got there before he did because he, of course, doesn't like to fly, so he's taking the bus, Jones says.

She had sent Kelly racy photos while he was en route to the hotel and was excited to reunite face to face. As she waited in the hotel room for Kelly to arrive, she heard a knock at the door. He brushed past me, Jones says. I'm thinking we're going to hug or peck each other, but he plopped out on the couch and pulled out his penis and started pleasuring himself. Now, that's not a great first move, but these are both adults for one thing, so nothing illegal is going on here.

And also, everything's different for celebrities. I was attracted to him and was just like, well, okay, fine, she says. Maybe he just has weird ways of getting off. The two had oral sex that weekend with Kelly, according to Jones saying things like, I got to teach you how to be with me and I got to train you. He was like a drill sergeant, even when he was pleasuring me, Jones says.

He was telling me how to bend my back and move my leg here. I'm like, why is he directing it like this? It was very uncomfortable. But at the same time, he's one of the most famous R&B singers in the world, super rich, flying you out and giving you a bunch of attention. So while there were a bunch of red flags, it's easy to see how someone in Kelly's position could convince herself to ignore them.

I think everyone listening to this, if you've been in relationships that have turned pear shape, have the experience of ignoring red flags. Sure, yeah, they don't have to be rich for me to ignore their red flags. Rich, so if he's got tens of millions of dollars and he's one of the most famous people in the industry that you're in, it's easier to ignore those red flags. What is that? A great line from Bojack Horseman.

Oh, when you're looking at things with rose-colored glasses, it's easy to ignore them. All the red flags just look like flags. I just interrupted you again. Well, that's a red flag right there. Yeah. It's all good. I talk a lot. It's all good for me because I interrupt people.

Whoa, hey, you've just been going through some of the stuff these victims have been doing, and there you go. Well, that's just because I have Libra on my chart, so... Whoa, well, now I am going to interrupt, because astrology has been brought into it, and that's the excuse I need to throw my logic brain at this. Let me tell you why I clap the hood of my car whenever I speed through a red light,

because men are not superstitious. They just know things. Yeah, like if you tap the hood of your car when you run through a red light, the police can't catch you. Oh, that's why. I do it and I make a wish. Oh, okay, cool. That the police won't catch me. I feel like we're both doing the same thing there.

Okay, so yeah, there were some red flags, but yeah, it's easy to see how she could have ignored them at first. Kitty found herself drawn more and more into R. Kelly's world. She was a fresh divorcee back on the dating field for the first time in years, and not really into dating sucks. Dating on just meeting randos in places is not the best thing ever. So having this rich, famous guy whose art she loved fly her all around the world and treat her like the only woman on earth

seemed pretty fucking great. You can see how it would wipe some of those flags away and why it would make her forget the unsettling news reports she'd been hearing about Kelly for years. They did come up in conversations with her friends. Quote, Rob kind of makes you feel like you have to defend him. It's like you and him against the world. If someone brought him up in conversation, immediately a wall went up.

You know, some of the first stuff Kelly told her was like that his girlfriend had died and he'd watched her die when he was eight. You know, he talked about his mom dying. Like when we started this story, it's easy. R. Kelly just talking about his background can get you on a side of it. Like he's been through some shit and he'd just been declared not guilty in a court of law. You can again. It's a good Tinder bio.

Not guilty in a court of law. That's actually my whole resume. Oh, God. Yeah, yeah, not in prison currently. So in September of 2011, Kitty Jones flew to Chicago to visit R. Kelly's Trump Tower apartment. Robert sent his driver to pick her up from the airport and ordered her not to talk to him and to report back if he talked to her. From this point, she started noticing that all the men in Kelly's orbit kept a strict distance from her.

In total, their relationship would last more than two years. Kitty Jones did the thing that I think Hollywood has taught all of us to do. She cast caution to the wind, let love into her heart and gave up everything to embark on a magical journey with a rich suitor. How many romantic comedies have this same basic plot? Working woman in like a high demand career like a radio DJ or an architect or whatever, you know, suddenly meets this ridiculously wealthy man who sweeps her off her carefully planned life path and off her feet and like she has this romantic. That's like half of the rom-coms I've seen.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Pretty woman. This is like 50 Shades of Grey fantasy. Like he's a little bit hard and creepy in some ways, but like he's also this super rich, famous guy. And I don't know. I feel like it's one of those things where like it could be easy to be like, how could you let this thing go to where it's about to go? Well, also you want to trust you. If you're a nice person, you want to think the best of people. So it's hard to look someone in the face who's being nice to you and be like, you're bad.

Yeah. Because people are multifaceted. They're not just good at bad, you know. Yeah. They do bad things and that we do have to take that into account, but they could be kind. Yeah. And it's like anyone you're going to get into a long-term relationship with, you will notice certain red flags about them because everybody has aspects of their behavior that could turn into serious problems, you know. Right. And maybe she thought she could fix it.

Maybe she was like, oh, he's getting better. He's getting better. I'm sure part of her told herself that. We are super good at lying to ourselves. Mm-hmm. And I think she made the same decision and where there's a lot of other women that have made these decisions. I just want to make it clear like everything about her actions up to this point makes sense to me. Sure.

I mean, it is weird like when survivors come out like women, mostly women, but not always women, but oftentimes women get blamed for wanting to believe the best in people. And so that I, why did you go with them? Why did you, why did you not say anything? Because they wanted to believe. Yeah. And the blame is not pushed on the man for doing the bad thing. Yeah. And it's all compounded when like this is all happening in luxury like first class airfare.

And like gigantic, fancy, beautiful furnished apartments and like all this, like that has an impact. Sure. We're trained to respond differently to that sort of thing. So in November, Jones quit her job and left Texas. She moved to R. Kelly's Trump Tower apartment. At least one of her friends at the time encouraged her to do it saying, you only live once. I mean, fuck, it's R. Kelly. Good logic.

There was some weirdness right off the bat in her interview with Rolling Stone. Kitty recalled one of the first orders Kelly gave her. He said, I have friends and I have girls I've raised. I didn't know what he meant by raised at the time. He said, I eventually want you to meet them, but I want to make sure you're mentally ready for that. Oh no. Yeah. That's unsettling.

That's a real red flag right there. Yeah, that is. That's like the size of that red flag they unraveled on the Reichstag when the third Reich fell that that scale of red flag. So as soon as she arrived, Kelly required her to wear baggy sweatpants anytime Kitty went outside and to text him with extreme regularity so he always knew where she was. She would send texts like, Daddy, I need to go to the restroom if she needed to like poop or something. New commands were introduced with regularity. Kelly would ask her to stand up and greet him whenever he entered a room.

Kitty says it took about a month for R. Kelly to hit her for the first time. Oh no. Yeah. Well, I want to like kind of interject a little on because I think there's some stuff getting confounded because I do think like clearly he's mountain of issues and clearly doing things that without consent, I'm sure with these girls. But also like there is like the whole idea of like, you know, Dom's and subset that in itself while if you're outside of it could be funny is not inherently bad. Oh, of course not. If it was a consensual relationship of being like, I'm going to text Daddy, whatever that, like it might be like weird for someone who doesn't do it,

but that in itself, I don't think it is inherently a problem. No. It's only a problem if it's non consensual because there are plenty of adults who get in relationships like that where it's for both sides, pleasurable to be the sub and be the Dom. Yeah. So I just want to add that because I don't think the idea of texting like, you know, some people are into that. Yeah. Absolutely, as long as there's a safe word and it's completely, you know, consensual, I think that would be fine.

Clearly, I don't think that's the case, but I don't want to confound some of the elements with criminal activity. Number one, aside from the allegations of physical violence, nothing we're talking about right now is clear evidence of criminal activity. Right. Because if she's into it or if she lied about being into it, we should teach women to be more clear about what they want. But, you know, if he said, this is a thing I'm into, are you down? And she said, yes. And she wasn't. That is a little bit gray area because, you know, I don't know.

I've known like everything up until we hit physical violence point, everything we're talking about could potentially be part of something innocuous. Yes. All of the behavior. Yeah. So Kelly hitting her occurred because she went back to Dallas for Thanksgiving. And while she was there, one of her friends or family members showed her the infamous R. Kelly p-tape. She got angry and called him to ask about it. He responded, bitch, don't you ever fucking accuse me of something like that?

When she flew back, Kitty claims R. Kelly met her at the airport. My heart was just beating through my chest. He just turned into a monster. I blame myself because I was like, maybe I shouldn't have said anything. Jones claims R. Kelly got her back to his car and then began slapping her repeatedly. I was putting my hand over my face and telling him I was sorry. He would start kicking me, telling me I was a stupid bitch and don't ever get in his business. Kitty Jones alleges that seems like this took place roughly 10 times in the first year they lived together.

In between, things would seem to return to normal. They'd shop and have fun. And once they'd been together for over a year, he even asked her to take part in his upcoming tour. At the time, it probably looked like things were getting better. Like maybe she'd fixed some of the fucked up things about him. The violence dried up and suddenly the relationship started to look like it was going to be the awesome ride it was always supposed to be. That's like gaslighting to be like, here I saw you doing a bad thing and be like, don't accuse me of doing a bad thing. It's like, no, no, no.

I'm not accusing you. I saw you do a bad thing. It's on tape. That's straight up gaslighting 101. Yeah, he's definitely gaslighting her. Here's where the Rolling Stone describing Kitty's role in the tour because he actually gave her a job during the tour. After Kelly brings Jones on stage, two men dressed in white lab coats make her sign a waiver and chain her arms inside a white cage. Kelly enters as a white sheet is draped over the cage, obscuring the couple.

The cage begins rocking as the band's music intensifies, with Jones and Kelly eventually shown silhouetted. After Kelly simulates oral sex on Jones, the two re-emerge in a mock fatigue Jones has let off stage. I've never paraded around anybody before. Jones says Kelly told her before their tour started. I'm going to make sure people see us together. So again, drawing her in. On January 2013, after they got back from the tour, R Kelly had Kitty Jones moved out of his Trump Tower apartment and into a room in his recording studio. She claimed she learned later that Kelly was moving another girl into the Trump Tower apartment, but at the time she thought they were just both kind of transitioning over to a new place.

Now R Kelly never told her this, but she says she eventually grew to realize she was living with two other women in the rooms attached to R Kelly's recording studio. Kelly did his best to stop the women from learning about each other. The rooms were filled with cameras and the women weren't allowed to leave without getting his permission first. It's a testament to the degree of control he was exercising over these people that it actually took a while for Jones to realize she wasn't alone. That's weird. When Kitty Jones did something R Kelly defined as misbehaving, he'd take away her phone for two months. Since she had to text him to do stuff like use the bathroom or eat, this effectively cut her off from being able to maintain essential biological functions. She claims it was March 2013 before she actually met another one of R Kelly's girlfriend seems like the wrong word.

She says he brought the woman in naked and said I raised her, I've trained this bitch, this is my pet. Then he made the other woman perform oral sex on her. Kelly describes the next chunk of their relationship as six months of hell. Yikes. So you're essentially grooming them to a point and then cutting them off from their regular lives and relationships so that they have to be stuck. He's doing the things a cult does. Yeah. He's doing all of the things a cult does except for inventing his own language, I guess.

Single hand. Well, maybe. He had to call him daddy. There's probably more coded language they had to use. You're right. You're right. The Rolling Stone article includes images of the texts and stuff. They've got her phone like text she would send him saying like I need this food or like can I go to the bathroom and stuff like that.

So like some of this is documented. Again, not illegal. There are consensual relationships that work like this or at least at times there are some like 24 seven. Right. So again, we're not condemning that but clearly Kitty was not giving enthusiastic consent. Right. And then wait. So the thing on stage she signs a waiver on stage.

Yeah. Like an act. So the whole gimmick is that. I think the gimmick is that he's pleasuring a random woman. Oh, okay. He's just so insatiable or whatever. What's up with the waiver? I think it's just because it's funny.

To be like as legal or something. Yeah. Yeah. I mean. Oh, like, oh, you're going to get hurt because I'm so good. Yeah. Something like that. Speaking of enthusiastic consent.

You remember when I said that a couple of sentences ago? Sure. And 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 Aaronson 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.

Each 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. And nasty sharks.

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 I heart radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass and you may know me from a little band called in sync. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories.

But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself 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 I heart radio app, Apple podcasts 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 I heart radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

We're back. We're talking about products. Do you love a good service? I do. Do you like products? I love it. If you had to rank products and services, would you put products first or services? I think they go hand in hand.

Okay. I'm going to go product that services me or services that I don't know. Services that product. I do love being produced. Yeah. Sophie. We brought that around nicely. All right.

Let's talk about our Kelly Moore. Okay. Great. I thought you were going to go into a read or something. No. I am about to. We had just gotten to the point where Kelly introduced Kitty to the other women he had trained, which are the other women who are living in this weird...

Do we know how many there were? I'll be getting to that. It's unclear exactly how many exist in total. There were three total women living in the building around this recording studio, plus another woman in Trump Tower at the time, so at least four ladies in the Chicago area. Okay. Yeah. Kitty describes the next chunk of their relationship is six months of hell.

This recording studio weird erotic compound is the cult described in the BuzzFeed article. That article starts with the story of Jay, a mother who alleges that R. Kelly brainwashed her daughter and brought her daughter into this creepy carousel of abused women that seems to exist if all this reporting is accurate. Between them, Rolling Stone and BuzzFeed have done their homework. BuzzFeed talked to Kitty Jones as well, in addition to two other members of R. Kelly's inner circles. There's a lot of sources for both of these articles.

There's a lot of research and backup that's been done. What they found suggests that six women live in buildings owned by Kelly in Chicago and Atlanta, at least six women, or at least in 2017, at least six women. They were all subject to the same sorts of controls as Kitty Jones. Kelly tells them when to eat and bathe, makes them do what he wants to their bodies, and of course he films every sex act between them. Jay claims that her daughter, who of course was an aspiring singer, met Kelly backstage after a show in Indio, California.

You might expect that experience to normally yield an autograph at best, but Kelly listened to the 19 year old's demo CD and gave her a detailed and insightful critiques of her performance. Now this was in 2015 and most R&B fans would probably agree that R. Kelly, you know, of course the mom's psyched. If you're like a fan R&B, your daughter wants to be in that genre, and like one of the best guys ever is listening to her demo CD and giving her critiques, of course as a mom you're probably excited.

What happened next was similar enough to what we saw with Kitty. Kelly started flying Jay's daughter to hang with him ostensibly so he could help shape and boost her career. Jay went along with the situation because first off, who wouldn't want your kid to be rich and successful? And second, her kid was 19, so there's nothing she could do to stop it. And she may be like with parents who don't understand that industry might be like, oh, well this might just be part of it.

They don't really know. They don't really know. And again, there's nothing you can do. So they were aware of the allegations against Kelly, both Jay and her daughter. And Jay and her husband tried to make sure that one of them would be around whenever their daughter was with Kelly. But you know, R. Kelly's a multimillionaire with essentially unlimited resources. So things got started.

Before too long, Jay's daughter moved in with R. Kelly and quickly ceased almost all contact with her parents. They still get the occasional scattered phone call, but the last time they saw their girl was on December 1st, 2016. It was as if she was brainwashed. She looked like a prisoner. It was horrible. I hugged her and hugged her, but she kept saying she's in love and Kelly is the one

who cares for her. I don't know what to do. I hope that if I get her back, I can get her treatment for victims of cults. They can reprogram her, but I wish I could have stopped it from happening. Buzz put together a list of some other women they believe are cut up and this whatever this thing is. This was like 2017. A 31-year-old din mother who trained newcomers on how Kelly liked to be pleasured sexually.

She has been best friend since high school with the girl in the videotape for which Kelly was tried in 2008. She recently parted ways with Kelly, these sources say. A 25-year-old woman who has also been part of Kelly's scene for seven years. A recent arrival, a 19-year-old model who has been photographed in public with Kelly and named on music gossip websites, a rarity among the women in his circle. An Atlanta songwriter who began her relationship with Kelly around 2009 when she was 19. She is now 26.

And a 18-year-old singer from Polk County, Florida, Max said the Florida singer is Kelly's favorite, his number one girl. Now you'll notice everyone involved in this is 18 or older, so it's possible that some were younger when things started. So there's no law being broken necessarily here, except for the allegations of physical violence. Those are just allegations at this point. Now years ago, a former young protege of our Kelly had told Jim DeRogatis that, quote,

he likes the babies and that's the sickness he can control her and she don't know no better. If the details of these women are correct, it is possible Kelly has gotten over that sickness because these are all adults. Or it might be evidence that underage women were never the draw to him. Maybe it's always been about control all along and that's why he always sought out such young women. If you take this view of it, then maybe it just took him decades to build up the skills necessary to do what he did to an adult like Kitty Jones and other adults like when he

was in his 20s, he could only get away with doing it to 16-year-olds. Now he's like 50-something. He's able to more effectively manipulate adults and that's what it's about is the control. Maybe that's it. BuzzFeed also talked to the parents of that 18-year-old singer from Florida, Kelly's supposed new favorite. She was 17 when they met after some of Kelly's people picked her and a few other young women out at a concert and pulled them on stage during the show.

Afterwards, one of Kelly's people handed her his phone number. Her parents were okay with them talking at first because they figured they could make sure one of them was with her whenever she met him and they thought it would be a great opportunity for her if she had a future in the music industry. This girl's mother told Jim DeRogatis that, quote, my thing was I trusted. I have never been in the music industry before, ever. Kelly is a lyrical genius. He's our Kelly.

And the fact is that he went to court, he was never found guilty. He was acquitted and we were led to believe there was no truth in it. Now I got all these people asking about why my daughter is there telling me all of that. The charges against Kelly was true. Well, how come you didn't tell me before? Yeah. I'd be pissed about the case too. Now it's hard to say if Kelly did anything illegal here.

The girl's mom does allege that one day after school her daughter met our Kelly after classes without telling her parents first. They came to the hotel and called the cops and she came down and left with them. Kelly had refused to speak to them. Their girl was 17 at this point and it would have been illegal if they did anything at that point. But soon enough she was 18 and old enough to do whatever she wanted. And as soon as she was 18 she moved in with our Kelly.

One of Kelly's former close associates who spoke with Buzzfeed is the person who claimed this lady is Kelly's favorite. But he also says he witnessed the singer punish her. Quote, he left the Florida woman on the tour bus for like three days and she was not allowed to come out. He said she didn't do her homework. That's why she was punished, which was very confusing because she had just graduated high school over the summer.

Yeah. What kind of homework is he talking about? Oh boy. That look is very ominous. What kind of homework do you do? It's something gross. It's something... Homework is standing for something gross here, I'm going to guess.

Sure. Okay. Yeah. And that is more or less the situation today. Kelly and his representatives deny any wrongdoing. These are all consensual relationships between adults, and right now it truly seems like there is nothing that can really be done about this from a legal standpoint. However, several boycott campaigns have been raised against the musician, hashtag mute

R. Kelly being the most notable. He has had a number of his shows shut down, and it does seem like a measure of justice has been done via journalism and public outrage. Robert Kelly's popularity has fallen significantly in the last decade. In 2015, he released The Buffet, his 13th studio album. It is the worst performing album of his career, selling only 26,000 copies in his first week. His 2016 album, 12 Nights of Christmas, seems to have sold better, peaking at 177 on the Billboard 200 chart, but he's not putting out the numbers he used to.

Critical reception to his music has also flattened out in recent years. It's possible some of this is due to the fact that he's in his 50s now, and it's not uncommon for people to... But yeah, it seems like it's possible that all of the reporting and all of the boycott campaigns have had an impact. Jim DeRogatis, the journalist most responsible for breaking the stories of Kelly's alleged sexual abuse and exploitation of women, was actually mentioned in a recent R. Kelly song. He's actually appeared in several of R. Kelly's songs over the years.

In July of 2018, R. Kelly dropped the 19 minute track, I admit, here are some lyrics. To Jim DeRogatis, whatever your name is, you've been trying to destroy me for 25 whole years. Right in the same stories over and over again, off my name, you done went and made yourself a career. But I pray for you and family and all my other enemies, I'm not going to let y'all steal my joy, I'm just going to keep on doing me. Now I don't know what else to say except I'm so falsely accused. Tell me how you can judge when you've never walked in my shoes, so easy to mess up someone

else's life. You know, I think that R. Kelly, I don't know, because I'm trying to think like is he a narcissist, but I don't think he quite fits the bill, but the elements of like, he has some elements of that, like, narcissist don't, he doesn't believe he's wrong, and I do believe that in that part he's telling the truth. So I do think he truly believes he's falsely accused because in his mind, in a twisted way, he's justified all of his interactions. So that's where it gets tricky, because people with someone so famous that they love want

that gotcha moment where they're like, I'm wrong and I lied, but I think they're never going to get that because I don't think he believes that he lied. I think he believes, because he's done these somersaults in his head to convince himself, I think he believes he's innocent because of whatever has passed or whatever, and so he's never going to admit he lied in that sense. So we just have to decide. Yeah. Yeah.

Now, Variety interviewed Jim DeRogatis about this, and I'd like to read a quote from that Variety article. This is Jim. I've accomplished a lot in my life besides this R. Kelly story, but I continue to get calls from sources six or seven times a week as I have for 18 years saying R. Kelly has hurt me or my daughter, allegedly. You're not a journalist or a human being if you get those calls and do not do your job. Has it made me rich?

Laughs. I have not gotten rich from reporting on R. Kelly. I've had a marriage ruined. I've had many sleepless nights and I have an ulcer, which sounds self-serving and I don't mean to, because what I've endured over 18 years is nothing compared to the stories I've heard from young women who had relationships with him that left them devastated, destroyed their families and their lives to the point of attempting suicide. Those are in public court documents and on-the-record interviews.

In October 2018, Kelly's wife went public on The View with explicit allegations of physical abuse at the hands of her ex-husband. She says she went public in essence to support the other women, like Kitty Jones, who have talked openly about the abuse they claimed to have suffered at the hands of Robert Kelly. I'd like to play a little bit of that. I'm going to try and get through it without crying. Very difficult. A lot of people know that I'm a professional dancer, so my body is my work.

And I remember one time he attacked me in the back of a Hummer and I do suffer from PTSD because of it, whenever Hummers, when I would see them on the road, I would shake my hands with sweat and I would get nervous and I couldn't breathe. And he attacked me one time in the back of a Hummer and I thought I was going to die in the back of the Hummer. Because what he had done, he'd taken this left arm and pulled it behind me and his weight was on my body, but he didn't realize his forearm was on my neck. So as he's pressing down, my breathing is getting labored.

And the only reason why I think I made it out was because I said, Robert, you're going to kill me. I can't breathe. You have to get your arm off of my neck. And I just remember sitting in the back of the Hummer and it got blue. And I just thought, oh my God, I'm going to die in the back of this Hummer and he's going to drive off with my body in the back seat and nobody's going to know. Wow.

Yeah. I don't know what other sound to make at the end of that. To end, I would like to go back to that 2016 GQ interview I quoted at the start of the first episode. The writer of that interviewed Kelly and got a lot of detail about Kelly's own sexual abuse as a child. Robert's answers to his questions are thoughtful and complex. At one point, he reflects on the generational nature of abuse.

This is Robert Kelly. Quote, as I'm older, I look at it and I know that it had to be not just about me and them, but them and somebody older than them when they were younger and whatever happened to them when they were younger. I looked at it as if it was some sort of like, I don't know, a generational curse, so to speak, going down through the family, not just started with her doing that to me. Later in the interview, R. Kelly admits that this experience caused him to be sexual much earlier than was healthy.

Then he said, quote, you know, no different from putting a loaded gun in a kid's hand. He's going to grow up to being a shooter, probably. I think it affects you tremendously when that happens at an early age. To be more hornier, your hormones are more up than they would be normally. Mine was, the reporter asked him, and do you think that set you on a path that you kept on? R. Kelly responded, yeah, in a lot of ways, absolutely. I think so.

Dang, so I just talked about what I said about him not knowing he's wrong. That sounds like a guilty man. That does sound like a really fucking guilty man, right? Yeah. Allegedly. You know what sucks is that because with stories like that, people wait so long for that moment to, like, you know what you know already, but we're waiting for like a moment of truth.

But we don't need that. We have it. Yeah. We have it, we have it, it's to 90 and it's like on his deathbed, and then he comes back and apologizes, you know people are going to forgive him. And that's the thing. It's like, no, we got to stop it in its tracks. We have to stop pushing people to show us the truth.

We know the truth. Yeah, we know the truth in this case. I don't think there's enough. Yeah, we don't need to wait for him to beg for forgiveness so we can forgive him. No. Because he's going to, like, at the end of, before he dies, he's probably going to be like, fuck, all right, I want to die knowing that I made all my wrongs right. By then, he's already done too many wrongs.

We should stop him from doing it now. But also, like, he can't stop him with any laws. There's probably nothing illegal being done, other than I'm guessing he's hitting these women pretty regularly, which is illegal. But if they don't, like, you can't just, like, have a cop hang out next to him all the time. Well, see, this is where I don't condone this, but this is why I do think it's funny when people make this joke, and for the record, I don't condone this.

But whenever people are like, you know what, let's just do it back to them, and I don't think we should do it. But when women are very angry and say that, I'm like, yeah, because they're not responding, responding to the peaceful protest, like, you know, he's just, he knows he's just gonna get away with it. There is no point where, and again, I'm not actually, this kind of joke, I don't really think we should abuse him back, but it's like, I don't know, there's more to be done than nothing.

Yeah, I think the boycotts are a lot. I think trying to, like, a lot of places have stopped reviewing his music, I know Rolling Stone won't anymore. I think we're past that. I think we're past boycotting. I don't know what else there is to do, though, other than you try to take away this guy's money, unless they're, like, as soon as someone else brings a case to court, then you can support that person.

But like, up until that point, there's, you can't, I don't know, legally, there's not much to do. Let's cut off his dick. All right. Well, how about you and I roll down to the Los Angeles County Courthouse and we file for a writ of dick removal. Or just like, suspend his dick. That was harsh.

I don't think we should cut it off. I think we should, like, suspend it until he stops doing that. A temporary restraining order between him and his own penis. Confiscated by the government. Confiscated by the government. Confiscated as dick. I know exactly which LAPD officer I would have delivered that. Okay.

He lives near my street. He has very large hands. I won't ask any questions about that. All right. We successfully ended on a light note with that joke about an LAPD officer's enormous uncomfortable hands. Teresa, you got some pluggables to plug. Sure.

I'm at Larissa T on Twitter and Instagram, and I have a podcast called You Can Tell Me Anything. I'm Robert Evans. I have a book called A Brief History of Ice. You can buy it on Amazon. I hurt myself with drugs. And Teresa. And I was in the promo video.

I know. I still get messages regularly about that. I gave you way too many mushrooms without meaning to, and you tripped for hours. That was a fun night. It was fun. We're all way too high. Well, that's going to do it for us today. You can find this podcast at BehindTheBastards.com.

You can find us on Twitter and Instagram at AtBastardsPod. And you can buy our merch at T-Public behind the bastards. We got cups. We got stickers. We got shirts. We got hoodies. We have a scale replica of the Fat Boy atomic bomb that was dropped in 1945 with a picture of my face smiling on it.

So all of those products and more available on our T-Public store behind the bastards. Check us out. And until next week, remember, I love statistically, stochastically, roughly 40% of you. 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 were 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 Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Alphabet Boys 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 in 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 Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. 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 Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.