Front Burner - Why R. Kelly's Charges Were a Long Time Coming

Episode Date: February 27, 2019

After years of allegations, singer R. Kelly faces ten charges of aggravated sexual assault. Music critic Lindsay Zoladz talks about the case, and why #metoo moved more slowly in the music industry.

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Escaping NXIVM, from CBC Podcasts Uncover. Subscribe now at cbc.ca slash uncover. Hello, I'm Jamie Poisson. For decades now, the singer R. Kelly has been dogged by allegations that he violated underage girls and women. More recently, that he held some of them as slaves, essentially. Then in January, a documentary series called Surviving R. Kelly came out. It pulled together all these threads that have been out there for a very long time. What do you want to say to R. Kelly if he's watching? I'm not afraid of you anymore.

I'm not afraid of your lawyers. I'm not afraid of your goons. I would give my life for my justice. After the doc came out, R. Kelly was charged with 10 counts of aggravated sexual abuse against four women. Robert Kelly was indicted before a Cook County grand jury. The abuse allegedly spans a period between 1998 to 2010, and at least three of the victims were between the ages of 13 and 17 at the time. On Monday, Kelly pleaded not guilty to all 10 counts and on Tuesday posted a $100,000 bond. Right now he's out of prison. R. Kelly walked out of Cook County Jail into absolute chaos.

Some people see this as the next step for the Me Too movement, which called out abuse by men in the film industry, but also publishing, politics, and even public radio. But the music business, it moved a lot slower. Today on Frontburner, I'm talking to music critic Lindsay Zoladz from The Ringer about what took so long with R. Kelly and why the music industry has been slow to act. Thanks so much for joining us today. Yeah, thank you for having me. So R. Kelly is facing 10 charges, as we just mentioned, and he's out of prison after posting bond. He's pled not guilty. But this really isn't the first time he's faced allegations. And I want to start today by just sort of going

over what we know about the allegations against R. Kelly, which started in the 1990s. I think the first thing that really gave people pause was when R. Kelly first came out with his new protege, who is this 15-year-old singer named Aaliyah. It was not publicly known how old she was at that time. And in fact, the album and the hit song that R. Kelly actually wrote and produced for her was called Age Ain't N around her musical partnership with R. Kelly that was already kind of flirting with the themes and, you know, the incidents that would go on to define the darker part of his career. And he was sort of presenting her as this protege at first, but then some people started to get suspicious that they were romantically involved. He was 27 at the time. Everybody seems to think that y'all

are either girlfriend or boyfriend or cousins. Well, no, we're not related at all. No, we're just very close. He's my best friend. And he and Aaliyah did get married. And someone on his team actually falsified her age on the marriage certificate to indicate that she was 18, when in reality she was only 15 years old. So that marriage fell apart very quickly within days. It was annulled. But it was the first inkling that something's up with this guy. You know, at the time, it was reported on as just sort of this oddity. Hip-hop star R. Kelly did indeed marry his protege, the 15-year-old singer Aaliyah Houghton. Whether or not she's in legal trouble for passing off fake ID remains to be seen.

We will keep you posted. And there were several investigations into it. Vibe magazine did publish the wedding certificate with Aaliyah's false age on it. So there was a little bit of scrutiny to this. But for the most part, I think it was something that people just overlooked and thought like, all right, this guy's a little strange. He came out with, I believe I I Can Fly not that long after that. And people seem to be willing to overlook some of that strangeness in service of the music. After this marriage to Aaliyah, there are these lawsuits that start getting settled in the early 2000s.

Yes. So the Chicago Sun-Times has been reporting on R. Kelly's exploits since 2000, when he was in his early to mid-30s. early to mid-30s. And there were always rumors, I guess, that he had this proclivity for underage women, that he would hang out at the local McDonald's or outside of a high school just trying to pick up teenage girls who were defenseless in the presence of this successful superstar. He had this pattern of preying upon a certain type of young black woman and sort of exerting his power over them. So in the early 2000s, you also start to see reports of these settlements that he's making to women who, you know, there was a woman, Patrice Jones, who claimed that he got her pregnant when she was underage and then forced her to have an abortion. There was another woman alleging that

he made a sex tape of her without her permission or knowledge. So there's all sorts of things like that coming to light. And then we get the bombshell of these charges for child pornography that come in June 2002. What happened there? So this is connected with the now infamous sex tape that shows R. Kelly or a man who seems to be R. Kelly urinating on a young woman during sex and engaged in a sexual act with her and one other woman. It is alleged that the woman in the video was 14 years old at the time. Kelly is accused of videotaping himself having sex with an underage girl sometime between January 1998 and November 2000.

So he's charged in Chicago with 21 counts of child pornography. And this comes from the Chicago Sun-Times was anonymously essentially sent this tape and they turned it over to the police and then he was charged. So he posted bail and then the strange thing is that six years go by before this case goes to trial. And there's a number of reasons why purposely his team delaying things and mucking up the machinery a little bit. More than 30 pretrial motions have contributed to delays in this case. And also at one point, the judge fell off a ladder at home, injuring himself. And another time, R. Kelly had a burst appendix and needed emergency surgery.

But for whatever reason, it sort of gets stuck in this legal purgatory. So the case doesn't go to trial until 2008. Six years has been long enough. We want no more delays. We want him prosecuted now. I love R. Kelly, and I know he didn't do it. I know him prosecuted now. I love Mark Kelly. I know he didn't do it. I know that's not him. He's not guilty. There's also a real reluctance of the woman at the center of this controversy and her family to testify. They don't want to take the

stand. And, you know, in cases like this, and I think a lot of what we've seen in the wake of the Me Too movement is there is a lot of shame associated with these cases for the victim. And it's hard to take the stand for such a lewd crime. It's embarrassing to these women. Right. You know, at this time, I remember this was a tape that could be bought on the streets of New York. And there was a lot of media around it. What I also find particularly disturbing, looking back on it, the culture around this tape. Dave Chappelle was doing jokes about it. If you want to know how I feel about it, honestly, if a man cannot pee on his fans, I don't want to be in show business anymore.

Because, well, that's why I got in the game, baby. I got dreams, too. And it sort of became this comical thing when really there was like a 14-year-old girl at the center of this. to look back on in a personal sense, because his music and his celebrity were so pervasive at this time that everybody has memories attached to an R. Kelly song or I Believe I Can Fly, Ignition remix. They're just like a part of the culture. And these songs, you know, Remix to Ignition and I Believe I Can Fly,

they're all coming out around the same time. It's like he's facing these charges in court. And he's also doing incredibly well in his career. His songs are getting to the top of the chart. No, it's true. He was also courting this humor in his music. This is when he releases the Trapped in the Closet series of songs that are really over the top and ridiculous and have this really soap opera-ish music video accompanied with them. And he almost tactfully was trying to turn himself into something of a clown, I think, as though that would make these charges less likely to stick in the court of public opinion. The sad thing is, for a while, it really worked. I think as a culture, and especially after he was acquitted in 2008,

we really didn't hold him accountable in the way that we should have and in the way that I hope we finally are going to now. In court, they found me innocent, you know. So I'm hoping that fans that I've given good music to and people around the world for 15, 16 years could do the same thing, you know, and give me my life back. We'll be back in a second.

Discover what millions around the world already have. Thank you. from renowned actors and narrators. With the free Audible app, you can listen anytime, anywhere, whether you're at home, in the car, or out on a jog. The first 30 days of the Audible membership are free, including a free book. Go to www.audible.ca to learn more. And if we fast forward to recent years, there are all of these new allegations springing up around R. Kelly, which are incredibly disturbing. Essentially that he has taken young women and kept them as slaves in his house. And can you tell me a bit more about that? a bit more about that. Sure. So in 2017, a long report comes out in BuzzFeed that was authored by Jim DeRogatis, who is the former reporter for the Chicago Sun-Times, who's been on the R. Kelly beat

for almost 20 years now and has been the vanguard of reporting these stories and waving the flag when nobody else was. And he publishes this really bombshell report in BuzzFeed alleging that R. Kelly has these women essentially brainwashed and trapped in his house and that they're not allowed to speak to their families or each other and that he is in control of things like when they're able to eat or go to the bathroom. And it's this relationship that he has with them. It's, you know, people are calling it a harem or a sex cult or something. And there are families of these women who are speaking out and speaking to TMZ saying that they haven't had contact with their child in years because R. Kelly has been

keeping them in this psychological stranglehold. And, you know, some of these women, one, her name is Joycelyn Savage, did a call to TMZ where she said, I'm fine. I'm here of my own accord. I just want everybody to know, my parents and everybody in the world, that I am totally fine. I'm happy where I'm at and everything is OK with me. But, you know, a lot of people thought that was orchestrated by Kelly himself and his team to just clear the air a little bit. So those allegations have been particularly disturbing. And there also was in the Surviving R. Kelly documentary, there's one young woman who essentially says that she met R. Kelly when she was a teenager,

basically cheering him on outside the courtroom in 2008, and that he was essentially picking new victims from the young women who were fans of his that were there to support him. I went to his trial because I was a super fan at the time. I didn't believe he was guilty and I didn't want to believe that he was guilty. I was a freshman in high school. He was old for me to like him but I fell in love with his music. After Robert's trial, his friend sent me a message and invited me to R. Kelly's party. And that's particularly chilling. You know, all along, he's denied all of these allegations.

As you mentioned, he said he didn't know Aaliyah was 15 years old. He said that the lawsuits, like, they just, they weren't true. He said that the 2008 charge, it wasn't him that was in this video, and that his defense against these allegations that he's keeping all of these women, you know, captive in a way,

is that they want to be. There's been a campaign stemming from these allegations that started in 2017. So before the Harvey Weinstein story and the New York Times, before Me Too even started. And can we talk about what's happened in that campaign? The hashtag Mute R. Kelly has really taken off, you know, at first it started just with kind of simple aims of getting certain radio stations to stop playing him or just getting Spotify to take down his music. I've never done anything like this before. I just was so enraged. I felt like I just had to do something. And so I started a petition to get him off the radio in Atlanta, real humble. And it just kind of steamrolled downhill from there. Flash forward to 2019.

And as of a month ago, he was dropped by his record label in the wake of the Surviving R. Kelly documentaries. Sony Music announcing that they're dropping the artist from their roster. I think you're finally seeing R. Kelly being held accountable for two reasons. They're both tied to how we sort of consume our media and understand social justice in this era. So that's the sort of hashtag activism of Mute R. Kelly. But also, I think the Lifetime documentary, Surviving R. Kelly, was able to tap into the streaming age, where it was kind of the big talked about show this year, and people could just sit down and stream it all, which is what I did. And I found it to be really riveting television

and kind of made me at least pay attention to certain details of the case that I had not connected to other elements of his career and really just take it all in. Yeah, no, I see what you're saying there. I mean, for me, watching this documentary, I felt, I think if I could say, if I felt one overarching thing, it was shame. You know, I'm like ashamed that I spent a good chunk of my teenage years listening to his music, knowing the path of pain that he left behind. You know, the documentary also interviews his ex-wife, Natalia, a woman that he married afterwards and had two children with, who talks about, you know, years of emotional and physical abuse.

OK, I'll take responsibility for it. I'll just say it's my fault. I'll say yes to whatever it is. I'll apologize because if I can just get him back to the good guy, the one that I fell in love with, then I'm in a good space. It's difficult to watch. You know, I'm interested. I know this is an industry that you spend a lot of time in and thinking about. Do you have a sense of why it took so long

for this reckoning to come when it came to R. Kelly? You know, one of the arguments made in the documentary is that if the victims hadn't been young Black women. Yeah, I absolutely think, unfortunately, there's a lot of truth to that. And the documentary and just the reckoning that we're having with this case right now is an opportunity for all of us to do some internal work and really work through that shame of maybe having supported him and having looked the other way when we were hearing these allegations. To look into the eyes of these women who have survived his abuse and his ex-wife and to really

see the pain and the hurt in their faces and to kind of see them working through these emotions that just really cannot be faked. It's hard to deny after seeing the human toll that his actions have taken on so many women. I just like, you know, know that you really hurt me. I was a little girl in, like, a bad man's world. I never really recovered from it. What affected me affected my children. What affected my children affected their grandparents.

You destroyed Christmases, birthdays, graduations. And for that, I will never forgive you. It feels as though the Me Too movement has been lagging in the music industry, while all these other industries have seen high-profile men get called out. But recently, we've seen a few prominent men facing accusations. So Ryan Adams was accused of lewd text exchanges with a 15-year-old in a report with the New York Times. Reports on allegations of preying on aspiring young female artists, promising to help their careers,

and when things didn't go the way that he wanted after he pursued them, becoming emotionally abusive. There are allegations that go back a long time, and he's disputed the accuracy of that reporting. And a new documentary is coming out this weekend about Michael Jackson. He told me if they ever found out what we were doing, he and I would go to jail for the rest of our lives. We haven't seen that documentary yet,

but it reportedly details the stories of two men who say they were molested by Jackson when they were seven and 10 years old. And the Jackson family has filed suit against HBO. But also, these are not new allegations either. So do you think that we've seen this lag with the music business? It did take longer for the music industry to catch up to other industries that were having this post-MeToo reckoning. And I think a lot of that has to do with the stereotypes and the behavior to cover over a lot of things that the same pattern as what you see R. Kelly really taking to this extreme. There's such a sordid past to dig through as well and a complicitness through the various arms of the industry that make money off these people, frankly. I mean, something we haven't mentioned is that R. Kelly has sold about 100 million albums in his career, which is so much money

and so many people profiting off that in the industry. And I think for a very long time, that bottom line was enough for people to keep quiet and not to question things in the record industry. And I do think a sort of sad part of why he's finally being held accountable now is he doesn't really have that cultural capital that he once did.

He's not selling records and making hits the way that he was a decade or two ago. And it's sad that that had to play a part. You know, when he was arrested this time around, he couldn't post his bail for several days and had to stay in jail, which was not true when he was arrested in 2002. So I do think, unfortunately, money plays a big part and the way that other people in the industry are able to profit off some of these artists and how it is more profitable to stay quiet about these things and work with the

abuser rather than causing a stink and walking away from that work. I think what we do with the past is a whole different story and a more complicated story. I have a lot more hope about the future generations of artists that will be able to make music in hopefully a more equitable and just industry. But I think there's a lot of work that needs to be done before we get there. And it's going to be hard, and it's going to cause us

to really self-reflect in a lot of ways too. Lindsay, thank you so much. Thank you. Since the charges against Kelly were laid, a venue in Germany decided to pull the plug on one of his gigs, according to NBC News. That venue had previously defended its decision to have him play. Though at this point,

R. Kelly has had to surrender his passport, so it's unlikely he'd have been able to perform in the first place. That's all for today. I'm Jamie Poisson. Thanks for listening to FrontBurner. It's 2011 and the Arab Spring is raging. A lesbian activist in Syria starts a blog. She names it Gay Girl in Damascus. Am I crazy? Maybe. As her profile grows, so does the danger. The object of the email was, please read this while sitting down. It's like a genie came out of the bottle and you can't put it back.

Gay Girl Gone. Available now.