Soulless

by Jim Derogatis

  Kelly pulled out of an interview with Vibe at the last minute, but Danyel Smith sat in his dressing room backstage at the Spectrum as he nonetheless posed for the photo shoot. Road manager Demetrius Smith warned her not to take notes or ask questions, but two female fans in their early twenties walked in and asked not only about the alleged marriage but about rumors Aaliyah was pregnant. “Don’t believe everything you read,” Kelly said.

  The singer repeated that line often in years to come, whenever he didn’t completely avoid the subject of Aaliyah. She is never mentioned in Soulacoaster. “In telling my story, certain episodes could not be included for complicated reasons,” reads an author’s note.

  I interviewed Aaliyah by phone for the Chicago Sun-Times a week after the publication of the Vibe article. My story previewed a Chicago concert supporting her debut album, opening at the UIC Pavilion for Keith Sweat, Silk, and Blackstreet on New Year’s Eve, 1994. Smart and sassy in a self-assured but playful way, she told me the phrase that seemed to precede her name in every article didn’t bother her. “It’s always Aaliyah and R. Kelly, R. Kelly and Aaliyah, but I don’t mind being called his protégé, because that’s what I am.”

  Before that interview, I called Cook County Clerk David Orr, and he confirmed that the marriage certificate in Vibe was authentic. The officiant it named refused to comment about R. Kelly. “I’m not going to say anything,” the Rev. Nathan J. Edmond told me. “If you want to know anything about him, you can ask him.”

  When we talked, Aaliyah said she had seen the document in Vibe, but she didn’t have much to say about it. “I saw it, but I don’t really comment on that, because I know that’s not true. When people ask me, I tell them, ‘Hey, don’t believe all that mess. We’re close and people took it the wrong way.’ We’re really cool friends. We’ve known each other for four years, but it’s a friendship, and it will continue to be a friendship.”

  R&B stars’ female protégés tend to have short-lived careers, I told Aaliyah. Witness the Mary Jane Girls produced by Rick James, or Vanity 6 produced by Prince. She giggled. “Of course, there’s a connection with me and Robert, because he did write the whole album, but as far as the second album, he probably will do some songs, but it won’t be a whole project. I do see myself becoming my own artist. If you know your own style and you’re sure of yourself, you can definitely overcome the protégé thing.”

  I made one other call for that story, to Wayne Williams, the Chicago-based A&R rep at Jive for both stars. “I’ll tell you this, they ain’t married,” he said. “You don’t see no ring on her finger, right? As far as all that other stuff, I’m sure that’s just media hype. Robert has reached a level now where he’s going to get a lot of rumors. The more successful he is, the wilder they’ll get. I know Robert and Michael Jackson were talking about this. Things get crazy, and they get out of hand after a certain point.”

  From beginnings even more humble than Kelly’s—Jackson and his eight siblings grew up in a 672-square-foot ranch house in Gary, Indiana, thirty miles southeast of Kelly’s childhood homes on the South Side—Jackson had become a worldwide superstar, the self-proclaimed King of Pop. While soliciting songs for the album that became HIStory: Past, Present and Future, Book I, his managers gave him the demo for a song by Kelly called “You Are Not Alone.” Jackson liked it so much, he flew to Chicago to record with Kelly at CRC in November 1994. As much as he longed to work with the King of Pop, Kelly had come to fear flying to the extent that he didn’t want to travel to record at Jackson’s Neverland Valley Ranch in Los Olivos, California. The trip testified both to Jackson’s fading star and Kelly’s ascendant one.

  In the summer of 1993, a dentist named Evan Chandler said his thirteen-year-old son Jordan had been sexually abused by Jackson. The star’s camp filed suit, claiming a shakedown by the boy’s father. In January 1994, prosecutors announced they would not bring extortion charges against Evan Chandler. At the same time, Jackson paid the family a sum of about $25 million; he later claimed his lawyers made the settlement without his consent. Grand jury investigations in Santa Barbara County and Los Angeles continued for several months but ended without the star’s indictment.

  Released in August 1995, “You Are Not Alone” became Jackson’s first No. 1 hit after the child-sex scandal, and the last of thirteen during a solo career that started in 1972 with “Ben.” His love song to a rat is only marginally less saccharine than “You Are Not Alone,” a leaden ballad. “Another day has gone / I’m still all alone,” Jackson sings in the opening, before Kelly joins him on backing vocals a few lines later. “Did you have to go / And leave my world so cold?”

  I met Kelly in person once, in January 1995, during an early-morning press conference the Chicago chapter of the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences held at a Loop hotel. It took place as nominations for the 1994 Grammy Awards were simultaneously announced in New York, Los Angeles, and Nashville. Given 12 Play’s phenomenal success, local NARAS members were certain it would garner several nods, and they invited Kelly to the event. They were wrong, and Kelly was shut out.

  I approached the singer after the list had been read, while he sat hulking in a chair against a wall, legs splayed wide. Surrounded by handlers, he hid behind his omnipresent shades. We shook hands, and I asked a few dumb questions—Given your success, do prizes even matter?—which prompted only grunts in reply. He seemed pissed-off about being dragged to a stupid press event for nothing. I did not push my luck by asking about Aaliyah.

  We talked at length for the only time eight months later, as “You Are Not Alone” sat atop the charts. With a sensibility almost entirely shaped by USA Today and the Today show, a new editor at the Sun-Times couldn’t get enough stories about Michael Jackson in the paper, though she always chided me for noting the Jordan Chandler sex scandal, because “it only upsets the readers.” My colleague Dave Hoekstra covered Kelly during my first stint at the paper. Hoekstra loved old-school soul and R&B, and that first interview he did with Kelly focused a lot on their mutual appreciation for Donny Hathaway. Since Jackson wasn’t talking to anyone, I reached out to Kelly to discuss “You Are Not Alone,” but the conversation also touched on the new music he was recording nonstop at CRC, interrupted only by trips to McDonald’s or rides in his Mercedes along Lake Shore Drive or on I-94 to the Six Flags Great America amusement park in Gurnee.

  The story ran in September 1995, shortly after I left the paper for the first time to become deputy music editor at Rolling Stone in New York, and three months before the less imaginatively titled R. Kelly album appeared in stores. The Jive publicist who connected us for the phoner warned me not to ask Kelly about Aaliyah, but the singer seemed willing to talk about anything, and he brought up the controversy, albeit obliquely.

  “I came up with ‘You Are Not Alone’ because I was going through some emotional things in my life. I’ve experienced some shit, maybe not on Michael’s level, but on my own level. And you’ve got to think, ‘If I was a nobody, and nobody knew me, nobody could talk about me.’” Kelly compared working with Jackson to playing with Chicago’s championship NBA basketball team. “It’s like playing with the Bulls; I could sit on the bench and pass out water, and after that I could die. I’m not holding him up, but I feel Michael is special, because despite these things he’s going through, he’s still trying to get his message across. If you want to get a message across, Michael is the perfect man for the job. I heard they’re playing ‘You Are Not Alone’ in places that don’t even exist.”

  I asked about criticism of the misogyny in Kelly’s music, noting that the Village Voice had recently said his songs had “the sensitivity of a porno loop.” He laughed. “I just do my best and pray to God that people connect with it and try to remember what my mother told me: ‘What comes from the heart, touches the heart.’ I really love Marvin Gaye, and his albums were pretty sexual. I’ve read things in old magazines where people had things to say about him, but people are forgetting there’s an artist, there’s
a creative situation, not just this freak. You’ve got to ask yourself, how can this same guy turn around and write ‘You Are Not Alone’?”

  As we were wrapping up, Kelly told me he’d enjoyed our conversation, and he wanted to add one more thing. “This is called show business. What I do in my music is what I feel, not necessarily how I am. I don’t walk around with my pants down all day saying, ‘Gimme a girl!’ People need to not judge what they see on the TV. Nobody knows Robert or what he’s been through. Not R. Kelly, but Robert. R. Kelly is a thing on TV.”

  CHAPTER 3

  THERE ARE LOTS OF PEOPLE WHO KNOW ABOUT THIS

  The Monday after Thanksgiving, 2000, I made a special trip back to the Sun-Times offices to take another look at the fax. A few things had bothered me about it over the long holiday weekend, and I cursed myself for not bringing it home. “Robert’s problem . . . is young girls.” Anyone could have written that, but the letter included a lot of specifics, unusual for mere gossip or rumor, and one passage especially stuck with me: “I’m telling you about it hoping that you or someone at your newspaper will write an article and then Robert will have no choice but to get help and stop hurting the people he’s hurting.”

  I didn’t think a random “hater,” as his supporters later said, would show that kind of compassion. “If you are not the right person at the newspaper to deal with this, I apologize for bothering you and ask you to pass this letter along to whoever is.”

  I made a photocopy of the fax and highlighted accusations that jumped out: “A lawsuit was filed by a young girl named Tiffany Hawkins in 1997. . . . Robert’s managers and lawyers kept it all quiet, and Robert paid her $250,000 to drop the suit. Since then, there’s been five or six young girls like Tiffany.” It seemed unlikely the media never reported a lawsuit filed three years earlier against a major star, but that could be checked. (The writer claimed to be sending the letter “along with the first few pages” of the lawsuit, but nothing else had come through. Pages often went astray at the Sun-Times fax machines.)

  “Right now, he’s messing with a thirteen-year-old girl who he tells people is his goddaughter,” the fax continued. “This one has been going on for more than two years now, and her parents are turning a blind eye because Robert hired her father, who is a bass player. It makes me sick, which is why I’m sending this to you. The Chicago Police have investigated him, but they never been able to prove anything.”

  I dug TP-2.com out of the bottom right-hand drawer of my desk, where CDs piled up until I took them home and stacked them in more piles there. The credits listed two musicians who contributed guitar and bass, one of them Greg Landfair, and right under “Special thanks to Jaya, Joann, and Drea,” who I later learned were Kelly’s two children and his wife, came “my goddaughter Reshona, Greg, and Valerie.”

  “There are lots of people who know about this,” the fax said, “but most of them are on Robert’s payroll, so they would just deny it all. But you could call Susan Loggins, the lawyer who filed Tiffany’s suit.” A number followed. I pulled out the Yellow Pages and found a sizable ad for Susan E. Loggans & Associates, Personal Injury Attorneys, same number, different spelling. “Or you could call Robert’s brother, Kerry.” The liner notes thanked Kelly’s half brothers, Bruce and Carey, and his half sister, Theresa, none of whom were names I knew then. “Or you could call Robert’s old manager, Barry Hankerson.”

  That name rang a bell from the Aaliyah controversy, which the letter also mentioned—“The gossip wasn’t all wrong”—but I’d never seen Hankerson quoted about whatever happened between his niece and Kelly. “Or you could call Sgt. Chuziki of the Chicago Police. She’s the one who was in charge of investigating Robert.”

  If someone made up a name, I didn’t think they’d make up such an odd Polish cop name. I called the main switchboard at CPD and asked for Sergeant Chuziki. The operator couldn’t find a listing, and I almost hung up before wondering aloud if any investigator with a similar name worked in sex crimes. The operator groaned and scrolled through what I assumed was a long list of names before connecting me to someone. When a woman picked up—“Chiczewski, Special Investigations”—I introduced myself as a reporter from the Sun-Times inquiring about the investigation into R. Kelly. “Oh, I was wondering how long it would take before somebody called about that. I can’t talk to you,” she said, and hung up.

  Fax in hand, I walked across the third floor into the city editor’s glass-walled office and told him I might have a story. An unreasonably calm, measured, and paternal presence in the often-chaotic newsroom, Don Hayner had gone to John Marshall Law School in Chicago before the much less lucrative calling of journalism beckoned. He read the letter slowly and carefully—he always read everything slowly and carefully—and agreed. Then I got to work.

  How did I get here, a pop music critic assigned to investigate a potentially explosive set of allegations about a hometown hero and one of the biggest names in popular music? At any daily newspaper, critics are first and foremost reporters. If the star tenor had a heart attack onstage midway through the opera, my colleague Wynne Delacoma on the classical music beat would not have written the lede “The performance was lacking last night.” Confronted with breaking news, the critic instantly sets opinion aside and as much as possible becomes an objective reporter. Like most journalists, the anonymous letter from someone tipping me to a big story wasn’t an anomaly, and I’d had one earlier in my career that led me to another complicated and troubling investigation.

  In 1989, I was twenty-five years old and writing a column called Hudson Beat for the Jersey Journal when a prisoner in the dangerously overcrowded Hudson County Jail in Jersey City sent me an anonymous letter describing conditions that sounded barbaric, and which he said needed to be exposed. Two broken toilets for every sixty prisoners; piles of garbage and puddles of excrement and vomit left for days; the stench of sweat, urine, and body odor in stifling heat with no ventilation. Built in 1929 to house 280 inmates, the facility held more than 700 at the time, and two prisoners had recently committed suicide. The first column I wrote about the jail prompted more letters and phone calls from other prisoners and their families, as well as whistle-blowers appalled by the county’s neglect.

  “Why should we care about the scum locked up in there?” one reader wrote in response. County statistics showed that 91 percent of the jail’s population was black or Latinx. The majority were male, but two floors also housed female prisoners, quite a few of them pregnant. The reader’s question sickened and infuriated me.

  I asked Hudson County officials if I could spend twenty-four hours at the jail, something I’d done at a homeless shelter in Hoboken, but the warden vetoed the request. Instead, after showing me an array of ingenious confiscated weaponry, including a toothbrush with a razor blade attached by a strip of adhesive bandage, and a ballpoint pen methodically sharpened into a shiv, he reluctantly granted a two-hour tour. Prisoners spat at, cursed, and insulted me, and I had to dodge plastic cups of urine and feces flung my way. The guard escorting me laughed. “See what we deal with?”

  After six columns about the jail, I got a call from the city desk at home in Hoboken one night in December 1989 about some kind of disturbance at the facility, and I rushed to Pavonia Avenue in Jersey City. I worked the crowd for an hour, corralling every cop, fireman, and EMT who’d spare me a second, trying to figure out what was going on inside. I eventually learned that sixty-two prisoners had rushed the guards in the third-floor gymnasium, which served as a makeshift dormitory. Unable to make their way down toward freedom, they ran upstairs and occupied the eighth-floor infirmary. I could hear them yelling and banging on metal pipes from the street, and they occasionally threw burning towels out the barred windows. Then I heard the shot.

  I later learned that what prisoners considered a protest (but the warden called a riot) started when jailers delivered a court order allowing a twenty-eight-year-old inmate to attend his mother’s funeral, seven hours after the service ended. Preparing for
what they called the “Goon Squad,” which they knew would rush in with batons swinging, the prisoners wrapped themselves ankles to eyeballs in thin mattresses. According to protocol, the rapid response team should have been armed only with nightsticks and shotguns loaded with “beanbag” rounds; filled with steel pellets, these could knock someone off their feet without killing them. Somehow, one of the guards in the flying wedge of twelve who ran up the stairs three hours after the incident started grabbed a live round. He fired from a distance of six feet at the first prisoner he encountered, aiming at the only part of the man’s body left exposed. The inmate’s head exploded in a cloud of red gore, just like a scene from the David Cronenberg film Scanners, one of the Goon Squad told me.

  I ran back to the newsroom to work on the story, and only in the week that followed did I pause to wonder whether the victim had been one of the anonymous sources who’d called or written me. I later felt as if all my reporting hadn’t accomplished a thing—the county prosecutor never filed any charges for the disturbance—but six years later, in 1995, the old jail finally closed and demolition began after a new facility opened in Kearny.

  I hadn’t set out to be a hard-news or investigative reporter. My twin passions were music and writing, and I hoped to combine them, but few journalists start work on the beat they dream of covering. A reporter may aspire to become a foreign correspondent or a member of the White House press corps, but she’ll be lucky to begin by reporting about the local sewage authority or school board.

  My mother always encouraged my interests. A voracious reader, she instilled the love of writing, but she never shared my obsession with music. She only whistled “Volare” when she cooked or did the laundry. My father worked as an underwriter for the Prudential Insurance Company in Newark until one night in November 1969, when he died from a heart attack in the sixty-nine-year-old wood-frame fixer-upper he and my mom had only recently purchased in Jersey City Heights, just across the Hudson River from Manhattan but part of a different universe. I was five, and my brother was two and a half. Mom sent us to Catholic grammar school at the local parish, Saint Nicholas, scraping by on the Social Security death benefit, payments from my dad’s prescient comprehensive coverage, and government cheese.