Today, Explained - The rise and fall of R. Kelly

Episode Date: June 24, 2019

R. Kelly is facing new criminal charges, as well as investigations that involve the IRS, the FBI, and the Department of Homeland Security. Jim DeRogatis went from reviewing his music to documenting his alleged misdeeds against minors. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This episode features some stuff you probably won't want your kids to hear. There's descriptions about sex abuse, and a lot of it involves minors. We'll begin in a few seconds. If I had not discovered two things around about age 13, the music of The Velvet Underground a Lester Bangs fan. Lester Bangs, for those of you who don't know, is a legendary rock critic. He said, in rock and roll, there are no facts. There are only myths.

Now, I disagree with him about that. Of course there are facts. But rock and roll and popular music are, of course, in large part about myth building. Jim also just wrote a book called Soulless, The Case Against R. Kelly. There's the myth of R. Kelly, the voice of a generation, the R&B superstar, the smooth lover, the soulful religious man, and then there's the reality. The biggest predator in the history of popular music. I know the names of 48 women whose lives he's significantly damaged, and I'm sure that there are many more. How much do you know about R. Kelly's early life?

You know, I think I have a very good picture of his early life, an even better picture of his life at Kenwood Academy High School. He attended for one year and then dropped out because he couldn't read, write, or do basic math. He claims to have been devoted to his mother, a self-professed mama's boy. I would have married my mother if I could have, he has said in interviews. In reality, when he was signed to Jive Records, again, fact and myth, people very close to him and close to his mother said it's as if he shunned her. She was driving an old beat-up battered Ford that she had to hotwire to start, and he'd bought his first of many Mercedes. But there seemed to be a deep resentment against his mother and other members of the family for

not protecting him from the child's sexual abuse. And he talks about being sexually abused by an older member of the family. He has since named it as his sister Teresa. But there was also an older man who preyed on him. He does not talk about that with the same frankness. Either an uncle or a play uncle. In other words, a friend of the family they just called uncle. At what point in all this does he discover music? Early on. He borrows the very first Casio battery-powered keyboard that comes on the market in 1980,

and he begins hammering out songs of his own. He's self-taught. He is a genius, you know, in terms of both the ability to craft these melodies, but also as someone who can't write, it's not like he's sitting down and writing these lyrics. He's working them out in his head and remembering them. What is he writing about? What are these early songs about?

His earliest songs are about his devotion to his mother and how she's working so hard to support the family. So I dedicated this one to my favorite girl how she's working so hard to support the family. As he begins to build a career, you know, as a member of two groups, first a group called MGM and then Public Announcement, Honey Love or those early songs are, you know, increasingly sexual. Yeah, come inside. Now turn the lights down. And of course, by the time he gets to 12th play, he's got his formula.

I knew I needed a hook, and my hook was going to be sexuality. He writes that in Solo Coaster. It's going to be the hottest, horniest bedroom jams, along with this spiritual side. And that's the entire canon of his work for 30 years. And his first big hit is a song called Bump and Grind. What is a song like that and his first album, 12 Play, which itself is a play on foreplay? He's talking about his next level foreplay. Yes, a regular lover may give his lady foreplay, but he's going to do three times better. Where do those songs take him?

To the top of the charts. It's a cliche. But I mean, from 12 Play, he is selling multi-platinum units. He is in incredible demand from other artists to write and craft, produce their records. The videos are a sensation. He rules black radio. And it's a couple of years still before he makes the big crossover into the white pop world. But he has songs on the pop charts from the beginning as well as number one R&B hits. I'll be your cloud up in the sky I'll be your shoulder when you cry I'll hear your voices when you call me I am your angel Celine Dion is singing with him, and it's a number one pop hit.

And of course, I Believe I Can Fly crosses every genre boundary there is to cross. I believe I can fly. I believe I can touch the sky. I think about it every night and day. Spread my wings and fly away. And, you know, a generation of kids grow up worshiping that song because it's in Space Jam. He's got these epic, uplifting ballads. And then there's the other side. You remind me of my G, I wanna ride Something like my sound, I wanna party There wasn't anything particularly groundbreaking about his ballads.

Was his allure the slow jams, his sex anthems? Yeah, I think it was the hook of I'm gonna be the biggest, baddest, nastiest bedroom Lothario. You know, the greats of R&B, Al Green, Marvin Gaye, Prince, have managed to make us realize that sex and salvation are the same, that sex is spiritual. So bringing together the gospel church and the party dance floor and bedroom groove is where the real magic, I think, in much of the great soul and R&B music is. And I was waiting for him as someone covering the pop music

beat in Chicago as a critic, liking his music, rooting for him, because how can you not? This kid starts out singing for spare change on the subway platforms and street corners and becomes a superstar, rooting for him but waiting for that album that brought both together the way Marvin Gaye does, that showed the true genius. And instead there was always this jarring dichotomy that was such a rapid shift from church to whorehouse that you get whiplash. When does the world first discover Robert Kelly's sexual proclivities might actually tend towards underage girls? When I got to Chicago in 91, 1990,

people already were whispering R. Kelly likes them young. I'm talking radio people, record company promo people, tape ops at the recording studios, record industry publicists. It was whispered everywhere. It was not a secret. And once he meets

Aaliyah, no one needs to whisper. How does that happen? Kelly, early on before any of the recordings, auditions for a gospel musical that's being produced by Barry Hankerson. He takes Kelly on as a client. Kelly doesn't want to be in the musical because he can't read the lines. But he gives Hankerson his demos. Hankerson's impressed. And then he introduces Kelly, his star client, to his niece, the light of his life, Aaliyah Dana Houghton. And Kelly, of course, writes and produces and titles Aaliyah's debut album, When She's Fifteen. And of course, what does he call

that album, my friend? Age Ain't Nothin' But a Number. Age ain't nothing but a number Throwin' down ain't nothing but a thing This love that I have for you It'll never change And in August of 1994, they get married under a falsified Cook County marriage certificate. She lies and says she's 18. She's really 15. You know, they're married. He has it all set up in a hotel suite just outside O'Hare Airport.

And he flies off to continue his tour with Salt-N-Pepa. And she thinks better of it within 24 hours and goes back to her family. Hip-hop star R. Kelly did indeed marry his protege, the 15-year-old singer Aaliyah Houghton. Kelly stated his age is 27, two years older than he previously claimed to be, and Aaliyah produced two pieces of ID that appeared to show her to be 18. She denies it and he denies it, and boy, that BET interview where they're dressed identically and touching each other and completing each other's sentences is weird and creepy. 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 not. We're just very close. He's my best friend. Aaliyah told me, you know, we were close and people took it the wrong way. Many of the people who were close to her and close to him say that there was real love there. The family, within 24 hours of learning about the wedding, separates them.

They never see each other again. I think they didn't realize the extent of what was going on and certainly didn't realize that by the time Kelly began preying sexually on Aaliyah, there had already been seven underage relationships, starting with Tiffany Hawkins, and she says, I introduced him to six of my teenage girlfriends. You know, it was this 15-year-old girl and six others before Aaliyah even. That you know of. That I know of, yeah. There could be more.

How does this whole mess come to you, a music critic? I reviewed TP2.com and two weeks after that review ran, I got a single page fax. Dear Mr. Deer Goddess, I don't know if you're the right person to bring this to, but I'm writing you hoping that you will write a story about what's going on with R. Kelly and

he will have to get the help that makes him stop. And they said the letter writer, who I don't know who it is to this day, you compared Robert to Marvin Gaye. Marvin Gaye has his problems, but they're nothing like Robert's. Robert's problem, and this is a thing that goes back many years, is young girls. You get this fax in 2000, the world knows about Aaliyah, but perhaps not much else other than whispers and rumors, especially in Chicago. How do you react? I throw it on the corner of the desk with all the hate mail I get. I thought it was a hater trying to bring down this beloved Chicago superstar. And then something bothered me. You know, I kept thinking about, I'm writing you hoping he will have to get help.

You know, I didn't think that someone just trying to spread lies and rumor about a successful black superstar was going to show that kind of compassion. You know, the thing I heard more than anything else in 19 years of reporting is not, I hate Robert Kelly. It is, brother needs help. Brother's got to stop. I mean, I've heard that a hundred times if I've heard it once. So I went back in and I looked at that fax and I began making phone calls. The fax gave me a name of a Polish officer in the Chicago Police Department and said that they had been investigating for some time Kelly having sex with a girl who was 13, who he called his goddaughter.

I called CPD and I asked for Sergeant Chizuski and I spelled it off the facts. Eventually, a woman picks up the phone and says, Chizuski, special investigations. And I said, I'm Jim DeRogatis. I'm calling from the Sun-Times about the investigation into R. Kelly. And she said, oh, I was wondering how long it would take before somebody called about that. I can't talk to you. And she hung up. I went right to the city editor's office and said, Don, I think there's something here. Can you read this fax?

And what do you end up publishing? There was this circle of girls who were 15 when Kelly was in his mid-20s, and he was picking them up at Kenwood Academy, the high school he attended for one year. I got the settlement and annulment agreement and non-disclosure agreement between Aaliyah and Kelly, so verifying that Kelly knew she was 15 and she had lied for the marriage certificate that had been out there. Vibe had published it in 1996, but no one had done any reporting. And I got some things there that I didn't even realize the importance of until almost 20 years later, that Aaliyah had promised in exchange for $100 in payment on the books, she would not pursue further action for damage to her

career or physical assault and battery by Robert on her. So the question lingers, did he not only take her virginity at age 15, but hit her? You know, and it was years before I began to hear those stories of physical abuse from women by Kelly. The controlling and the hitting and the ordering to follow his rules seemed to build progressively. What was the reaction to your reporting in Chicago and in the music world? Deafening silence. Aside from us being roundly condemned on Black Talk Radio

and the Black Soul R&B and Pop powerhouse stations. You know, we were trying to down a successful black man. Do you think it fueled the fire that you were a white rock critic? Absolutely. You know, both the hometown pride that Chicago has, but especially amplified in the black community where there's this pervasive racism and segregation. And here was a superstar. And not only was he a superstar from their streets, but he stayed because so many people

come from Chicago and become stars and they leave. But then someone sends you the tape. The videotape comes to me at home. I want to be done for the day and the phone rings and I say, Dear Agatis, and they say, go to your mailbox, click. And there was this unmarked videotape in an unmarked manila envelope. There had been rumors on the streets of a tape of Kelly with that goddaughter that was mentioned in facts number one.

So I suspected what it was, and it's the most horrifying thing I've ever had to witness in my life. I mean, think about how long 26 minutes and 39 seconds. That's a sitcom. Now think about seeing the joyless brutalization and command performance directing being told what to do of a 14-year-old girl for that long. It's truly a horrifying thing.

We haven't said it yet, but he urinates in her mouth. And that is not an act of fetish. It is an act of complete and utter disrespect for her as a human being. And you're not the only person who sees this video. What happens after you see it? Within a couple of hours of it coming to me, the Sun-Times had decided as an organization that this was evidence of a felony and we had to give it to police. And the Chicago police had been investigating him for two years at this point. They had interviewed the girl.

They had interviewed her mother and her father. They were not cooperating. But, I mean, this wasn't information we gave the police. It was evidence. And what do they do with it? They begin investigating, and Kelly's indicted on 21 counts of making child pornography six months later, or a little less than six months, June 2002. But it takes six years for him to go to trial between indictment and the start of his trial. And the single most lucrative, successful period of his career is while he is standing

in full view of the world accused of making child pornography. So I'd like you to know that this year's recipient of the 2006 Stevie Wonder Songwriters Award is R. Kelly. And after six years, the long-delayed child pornography trial begins. Kelly is accused of videotaping himself having sex with an underage girl sometime between January 1998 and November 2000 y'all need to leave him alone that's not R. Kelly there's a tape of him urinating and having sex with a young girl six years has been long enough we want him prosecuted now I love R. Kelly and I know he didn't do it. I know that's not him. The prosecution presents 15 witnesses who identify the girl on the videotape

and how old she was and speak about knowledge of Kelly and this 14-year-old having sexual contact. They include her aunt, her uncle. They include some of her best friends, the best friend's parents. They include her basketball coach. Kelly would come to her high school basketball games. None of the other teenage girls. Nothing about Aaliyah. No payoffs to any underage girls or the girl in the videotape and her family. None of that would be allowed as evidence in court.

Only the videotape. The tape runs 27 minutes long, and over the course of this tape, you start to look up at the ceiling, look down at the floor, look at your watch. It's one of the more disturbing things I have seen over the course of my career. The jury does not hear from the girl, her mother, her father, and they acquit. He had a wave to the media and fans waiting for him. His burden lifted after being acquitted on all 14 counts of child pornography. It was a resounding victory for the superstar singer after a six-year legal odyssey.

What argument did the defense make when there was this plain-as-day videotape of R. Kelly defacing a minor in various ways. There's all this confusion they're trying to throw out there. Kelly's defense team contends it is not Kelly on the tape. Maybe it's his half-brother, Carrie, who looks nothing like him. Okay, it is R. Kelly, but the girl's not the girl. All right, but then all this evidence was presented in the trial. The girl's the girl.

The video was faked. But video experts for the FBI and forensic video technologists said to hand alter that long a VHS tape would have taken, you know, hundreds of thousands of hours, the experts said. You know, and then there was this business just like in the OJ case. if the glove doesn't fit, you must acquit. There was a mole. One of his attorneys spoke at length about a mole the size of a dime on Kelly's lower back that they say is missing from the man on the tape. It's not in this frame. Well, yes, it is. It's right there. OK, no, no, that's video noise. That's not the mole. So all of this stuff is thrown out there. I don't think any of that is what convinced the jury. The jury just didn't hear from the victim. The jury foreman tonight tells ABC 7's Ravi Bejtwal the key to the case, the identity of the alleged underage girl

on the videotape. Was it R. Kelly on the tape was secondary to whether or not we could, beyond a reasonable doubt, assume and confirm that it was the victim that this face said it was. Once R. Kelly walks, once he beats this case, he doesn't just continue to be wildly successful. This reputation he has as a predator becomes a part of his persona in popular culture, right? R. Kelly leans into it. He drops this epic modern sex opera Trapped in the Closet. It's just one giant metaphor for his sexual demons. Yeah, it becomes kitsch almost.

And not just him, but Chappelle, by reducing what should rightly have been called the rape tape to the pee tape. Take me to your special place. Close your eyes, show me your face. I'm gonna piss on it. It becomes a joke. And, you know, Kelly is headlining Pitchfork Music Festival, and he's celebrated. You know, the ostensibly feminist Jezebel calls the Black Panties album a magnificent ode to pussy. I mean, I was an R. Kelly fan at this time, and I thought it was complicated and confusing. But seeing him on IFC and seeing him headline the Pitchfork Music Festival somehow made me think like, oh, this is OK.

From Pitchfork to The New York Times, from the Rolling Stone, you know, reviews to, you know, bloggers. Everybody's saying, you know, despite that unpleasantness, R. Kelly is a genius. It's not unpleasant. It's the statutory rape of a 14-year-old, one of 48 women whose lives have been hurt by this man. You know, the reporting was there. Only thing to make my life complete is when I turn your face to a toilet seat. I want to pee on you. Yes, I do. Yes, I do.

Yes, I do. I'll pee on you. I'll piss on you. But eventually people stopped laughing. In 2013, you do this interview with the Village Voice that gets a ton of attention. And a mom in Georgia, a couple of years later, in November 2016, sees that and Googles the reporting I've been doing at that point and tells me this story about her daughter. And I was Jonjalan Savage, and I soon talked to her husband, Tim Savage, and they led to 15 sources who tell me the story of this cult. Finally, after nine months in July 2017, I wrote about this sex cult, six young women being told

when to eat, when to sleep, how to dress, who they can talk to, how to pleasure him in encounters he records, and being physically and mentally abused if they do not follow his rules. There were six members in the cult at that point. I've only talked to one of them now, Dominique Gardner, who broke away. Now, less than a year after Gardner left Kelly for the last time, she tells a New Yorker the singer tried to, in her words, break her. She says Kelly was physically and emotionally abusive. The other two were Joy and Azrael, and they are still there, Joy Savage and Azrael Clary. There were six in July of 2017. These are women who are of age?

The sexual contact with Azrael Clary started when she was still underage in the state of Florida, where she grew up. Now they are of age. They're 19, 22. They have not seen their parents in three years or more. They were on Gayle King, CBS This Morning. What is your relationship, both of you, with R. Kelly? We're with him. That's our relationship. We're with him. That's what it is. And we're in a relationship with him. That's our relationship. We're with him. Yeah, that's what it is. And we're in a relationship with him.

Right. You just said it. A very strong relationship as well. Both of you. Yes, most definitely. We're exactly where we want to be. Our parents are just shaking R. Kelly down for money. Both of our parents are basically out here

trying to get money and scam because they didn't agree on what happened, you know, with music or wherever it could be, and they're just very upset. This is the first I'm hearing, to be honest with you, that your parents are trying to get money from R. Kelly. Okay. Because your father told a very different story to me last night.

Yeah, he's the manipulative. He's very manipulative, so he's the one you need to watch out for. Two things. If the Clary's and the Savages were out to tell a lie in a scam to shake R. Kelly down for money, that was incredible patience in a long game. Then nine months of intense legal vetting and fact-checking and reporting and corroboration and legal documents

and emails and photographs and corroboration and legal documents and emails and photographs and travel documentation. If these are all liars who are out for some sort of shakedown scam, there had to be easier ways to do it. And how did people react to your reporting? Did they dismiss it again? Hell yeah, right? I mean, the amount of social media hatred directed toward the Savages, the Claries, Asante McGee, Kitty Jones.

All of these women are liars, gold diggers, prostitutes. Not only are they not believed, but they are torn down and dragged through the mud. How does R. Kelly respond to your stories about his cult? I get a verse in I Admit. It's all lies. All of the women are lying. But finally, this year, all that reporting you did in BuzzFeed about this alleged sex cult leads to this big Dreamhampton documentary surviving R. Kelly that really feels like a turning point.

What do you want to say to R. Kelly if he's watching? I was a little girl in, like, a bad man's world. I never really recovered from it. I don't understand it. Why you would want to hurt so many women. I want him to be held accountable. I just don't want it to get any worse. I would hope that he would want to be a better person and quit hurting.

Quit hurting people. Quit hurting these girls. I'm not afraid of you anymore. I'm not afraid of your lawyers. I'm not afraid of your goons. I will not go away. I will not be quiet. I will not hide. Dream Hampton did something incredibly powerful. Her work introduced America in a visceral way to some of these women whose lives have been so hurt by this man. Was there a difference in like seeing it for people and not just reading your article, but seeing people's pain?

Absolutely. For 19 years, I'm sitting with young women who are doing the most difficult thing any woman can do, ripping out their soul and talking about on the record with their name, their sexual assault. And that is incredible bravery. And then to go on camera, it's even braver. I think that power was real and visceral. After the documentary airs and the world notices

in a way it never seems to have before, you get new charges against R. Kelly. Yeah, there are 21 counts now in the state of Illinois for criminal sexual assault. The original 10 and then 11 added on. They were just added on, what, at the end of May, right? Those additional charges are all on Geronda Pace, who broke her nondisclosure agreement for the first time talking to me in August 2017. She tried to get police attention years earlier.

She tried to get it again when she talked to me in August 2017. It wasn't any criminal action by the police until February of 2019 because television had shined a spotlight on Kelly. The Illinois case is, again, looking only at four victims. Are they underage victims? Three of them are underage. One's a legal age woman. But one of them's not cooperating. One of them is, again, Roshana Lanphair, the girl in the videotape in 2008.

It's a new videotape of her having sex with Kelly around the same time period, 99, when she was 14. She didn't cooperate then. She's not cooperating now. What should happen is the federal charges should come down. There is an investigation that has elements of the IRS, the FBI, and the Department of Homeland Security looking at 30 years of criminal obstruction of justice, 30 years of tax evasion, 30 years of sex trafficking. They're looking at the whole pattern, the whole pattern and the enablers.

And what's behind the pattern? I mean, I know he was abused as a child, but do you think he bought into his own rock and roll myth? No, I think he's pathological. I think he's a sociopath. And he knows how to manipulate people. The number of times I've been told that he is an excellent actor, you know, how he'll cry and how he'll talk about his own sexual abuse and how he can't read and can't write and play on people's emotions to get you to be subservient to him. He thinks he hasn't done anything wrong. He thinks God is on his side.

He thinks a lot of things, and none of them have to do with any other human being except himself. And so in the meantime, people just have to grapple with the fact that it was this guy who wrote the Ignition remix. Now, usually I don't do this, but go ahead on, break them off with a little previews of the remix. Now I'm not trying to be rude. This ode to joy that's become the soundtrack to birthdays and graduations and weddings. So baby give me that. Let me give you that. If you go to your nephew's wedding in three years and someone plays the Ignition remix, what are you going to do?

First of all, I hate weddings. I try to avoid them like the plague. But secondly, I would bounce out of there. But I do not see what the Mute R. Kelly women have done as cancel culture. If you can listen to Ignition and you know the evidence and you still say I can separate the art and the artist, I will not question you for that decision.

It's a complicated moral choice. And when you sit there and consider that choice, it's hard not to think about the choice a lot of people are making this year or even in previous years with Michael Jackson's music. And, of course, R. Kelly wrote Michael Jackson's last hit, right? Yeah, You Are Not Alone. You know, the Jackson thing, I think his mistreatment by his family and being turned into a star at such a young age and the dad being such a taskmaster, I think we knew that story better. We didn't know Kelly's as well.

I think both of them had tragic upbringings and some of the victimized become victimizers themselves. But that cannot forgive the many wake-up calls that both Kelly and Jackson had, and yet they continued. It's not that people don't believe that he's done these things. The people defending him now don't care that he's done these things, and they champion him regardless because these women do not matter. Jim DeRogatis is the author of Soulless, the case against R. Kelly. In an interview with the AP, R. Kelly's attorney Steve Greenberg said the allegations against Kelly aren't true because, quote, I'm Sean Ramos from This Is Today Explained. Thank you.