Soulless

by Jim Derogatis

  Kelly spoke to Chicago’s NBC affiliate, WMAQ, before he took the stage in Utah. “It’s not true,” the thirty-five-year-old singer said. “All I know is this: I have a few people in the past that I’ve fired . . . people that I’ve thought were my friends that’s not my friends. It’s crap, and that’s how we’re going to treat it. The reason these things are happening, I really do believe, is because of the fact that I didn’t fall back as far as blackmail was concerned. I didn’t give them any money. The world is getting ready to watch me sing a song called ‘The World’s Greatest,’ and you’ve got a tape out there trying to ruin my career. I feel like I owe my fans.”

  The videotape story got much more attention than anything Abdon and I had reported about Kelly before. Once again, the Associated Press picked it up as “The Chicago Sun-Times is reporting . . . ,” recapping that police were investigating a tape with an underage girl, and prominently quoting Kelly’s denial. No other news organization locally or nationally forwarded our work or added to the accusations in the weeks that followed, but this time, ministers and community activists in Chicago, Philadelphia, New York, Atlanta, and Los Angeles decried the star’s behavior. Many black women urged boycotts of stores selling Kelly’s music and radio stations playing his songs. Few of those businesses complied.

  The singer’s record label promptly released a one-sentence statement defending one of its biggest hit-makers: “R. Kelly has been with Jive Records for eleven years, and we fully support him and his music.”

  On March 19, 2002, Kelly released his next album, a collaboration with rapper Jay-Z, The Best of Both Worlds. The disc had the combined marketing muscle of four record companies: Jay-Z’s boutique label Roc-A-Fella and Kelly’s Rockland Records, and the larger labels for which the artists recorded, Def Jam and Jive. Sales proved disappointing for a joint effort pairing the biggest stars in hip-hop and R&B. The disc sold only 285,000 copies in its first week, at a time when superstar product still regularly moved a million units or more upon release. Although he didn’t comment on the video story, Jay-Z distanced himself from Kelly, canceling the planned tour supporting the album.

  This time, a few of Kelly’s peers weighed in, dissing Kelly. Rapper Nas told a concert audience, “We’re not up here molesting children. We’re not ‘The Best of Both Worlds.’” Sisqo, who’d scored a hit with the Kelly-like “Thong Song,” released a new track with the call-out, “The world’s greatest? Whatever / Ain’t nothing but a child molester.” And multiplatinum producer Dr. Dre shelved a single by his own latest protégé, R&B singer Truth Hurts, because it featured a cameo by Kelly. As a member of pioneering gangster-rappers N.W.A, Dr. Dre had a hand in crafting vilely misogynistic tracks such as “Findum, Fuckum & Flee,” “One Less Bitch,” and “I’d Rather Fuck You.” He also had beaten journalist Dee Barnes and tried to throw her down a flight of stairs, according to Rolling Stone. But even he had limits.

  “I haven’t seen the video,” Dr. Dre told MTV, “nor do I want to see it, because there’s a kid involved. That’s where I draw the line.”

  Abdon and I continued following every development on the R. Kelly front through the winter and into the spring. In April 2002, Kelly sold his home in the converted Baptist church on George Street. He’d purchased it in the fall of 1994, and we believed it was the scene of both videos we’d received. The singer had recently bought a sprawling, twenty-two-thousand-square-foot stone mansion in south-suburban Olympia Fields for $5 million. He’d always been impressed by the place when he drove by with his friends, he says in Soulacoaster, all the more so after he learned it had been built by an executive of his favorite restaurant chain, McDonald’s.

  Abdon made an appointment and toured the now-empty home on George Street while it was on the market. I laughed when I thought about him in his suit from Irv’s discount men’s warehouse, viewing the place with a real estate agent, as if he was a buyer who could afford a $3 million property. I know I couldn’t have pulled that off.

  The listing agent from Coldwell Banker pitched the redbrick building in the Chicago Tribune as “a very specialized property that would appeal only to a very narrow segment of the population.” The house boasted an indoor lap pool, a wall-size shark tank, a home movie theater, and a basketball court adorned with a Space Jam–inspired mural. It depicted Kelly shooting hoops with the Tasmanian Devil, Michael Jordan refereeing, and Yosemite Sam and Elmer Fudd sitting in the stands. Foghorn Leghorn also appeared, holding a sign reading, “Go R. Kelly!”

  The log-cabin playroom interested Abdon the most, and he noted that it came complete with video cameras mounted on a wall and on the ceiling above the hot tub. My sources said Kelly had already built an identical room in his new mansion. Investigators told us they’d toured and scrutinized every inch of the house on George Street, but they were frustrated that Mark Cavins, supervisor of the child sex abuse unit for the Cook County state’s attorney’s office, refused to request a warrant for them to do the same at the Olympia Fields mansion. They had hoped to find the clothes Kelly wore in the video. Some thought the state showed too much concern about possible criticism for harassing a black male superstar and not enough consideration of the young black girl he had victimized.

  The Landfairs still were not cooperating with law enforcement, and they weren’t letting investigators near Reshona. One of them who’d earlier told me that Greg and Valerie Landfair “were ice-cold” during their initial interviews in 1999 and 2000 said that during the new interviews about the videotape, they thought Greg was on the verge of talking. “We kept saying to him, ‘Man, this is your daughter, you’re a father, how can you watch this and not be furious?’ But his wife, realizing we were in there with him alone, burst into the room and said, ‘This conversation is over,’ and she dragged him out.”

  I continued talking to all the sources I’d developed, and by late April, three months after the Sun-Times revealed the existence of the video, some of them had received subpoenas to appear before a grand jury. The star’s handlers fully expected an indictment, and in an attempt to get in front of it, they arranged for Kelly to give a long interview to journalist Ed Gordon for BET Tonight. They intended the conversation to be the opening salvo of an aggressive campaign to minimize the damage to an incredibly lucrative career. By 2019, Kelly would prove to have earned nearly $250 million for himself and a full $1 billion for Jive Records, according to a source who knew the finances.

  Derrel McDavid, Kelly’s accountant-turned-manager, followed the advice of Los Angeles attorney Gerald Margolis and executives at Jive not only to retain a top-flight criminal defense attorney in Chicago, but to hire publicist Allan Mayer, as well. The public-relations battle would be as important as the legal fight, and Variety described Mayer as “Hollywood’s most prominent crisis specialist.” He had even coauthored a book on how to handle celebrity scandals, Spin: How to Turn the Power of the Press to Your Advantage. In his first big job for Kelly, he prepped the singer for the interview with Gordon, who’d been chosen for the exclusive because he’d be tough but fair. Kelly had trouble reading the notes Mayer prepared for him, so he walked the singer through them verbally. “Like a lot of people with a disability, they compensate in other ways,” Mayer told me. “He had an amazing memory.”

  During the interview, which first aired on May 8, 2002, Kelly sat across from Gordon in a luxurious suite in a downtown Chicago hotel. Hair neatly braided, beard trimmed, and eyes clear and sharp, Kelly wore a striped charcoal suit jacket over a black sweater vest and a white T-shirt. He looked unnaturally cool for a man risking fifteen years in prison and the destruction of everything he’d spent many of his thirty-five years building.

  For part of the interview, the Rev. James Meeks joined Gordon and Kelly. Introduced as the singer’s “spiritual advisor,” Meeks served as pastor of Salem Baptist Church in the South Side’s Pullman neighborhood. He was also second in command to the Rev. Jesse Jackson in the black community’s activist Rainbow/PUSH Coalition. “In America, we’r
e innocent until proven guilty,” Meeks said. “Rob hasn’t been convicted of anything, Rob hasn’t been charged of anything. . . . But, Ed, I would want the record to read that if he had been convicted and charged, God still has an umbrella big enough for all of us to fit under.”

  Kelly said Meeks supported him while he sought help for a problem he never specified. “I’ve done a lot of things in my life right now that I’m trying to get help for.” Two of his handlers told me they forced him to take medication to curb his sex drive (his attorney Ed Genson later confirmed that, saying, “I had him go to a doctor to get shots, libido-killing shots”) and he talked to a professional about his sexual addiction and compulsion to pursue young girls. Kelly saw Dr. Carl Bell, director of public and community psychiatry at the University of Illinois, and one of the most respected therapists in Chicago’s black community. Not surprising, given patient confidentiality, Dr. Bell declined to speak to me.

  Kelly perfectly parroted Mayer’s talking points for most of the interview. The singer said he was no angel, “but I’m not a monster.” He asked fans to have faith in him and to “focus on my music.” Yes, he admitted, he had been thinking a lot about the impact of all this on his family. “I’m very concerned about my career, but most of all, I’m concerned about my life. I’m trying to protect my life right now.” Then Gordon asked about Aaliyah.

  “It has nothing to do with this,” Kelly said, his face registering pain and loss. He seemed on the verge of tears. “I really don’t think it’s fair to say anything about Aaliyah.”

  Aaliyah had released her third album in July 2001, a self-titled disc that found her once again working with Timbaland, as well as several new producers. That August, she had traveled to the Bahamas to shoot a video for the single “Rock the Boat.” The morning after completing her scenes, she boarded a chartered Cessna 402 with six members of the video crew and the pilot for the return trip to Florida. The plane crashed shortly after takeoff, killing everyone onboard. Aaliyah was twenty-two.

  Only a few months after the accident, I had a short but emotional conversation with her mother, Diane Haughton. I gave her my condolences, and she thanked me for the reporting I’d done about Kelly, even though it included revelations about his relationship with her daughter. “Everything that went wrong in her life began then,” Haughton said, crying. She did not say anything more.

  The third and final album by Kelly’s former protégé shot to No. 1 on the Billboard pop albums chart and ultimately sold more than two million copies. Aaliyah had also made a second film, Queen of the Damned, starring as Anne Rice’s vampire queen Akasha. It opened six months after her death, and although it received lukewarm reviews, it became a cult classic.

  Kelly’s handlers couldn’t have been happier with the way he fielded the Aaliyah question. You’re too hurt to talk about her and too respectful of her family to get into all that again, they’d advised, but another tactic backfired. When Abdon and I first broke news of the tape, they began suggesting to anyone who’d listen that their client’s former manager, Barry Hankerson, and an artist who’d split from him, Sparkle, were using it to blackmail him. At the Olympics, Kelly himself had blamed the tape on “people in the past that I’ve fired.” His handlers suggested that Hankerson and Sparkle were angry they wouldn’t be making any more money with Kelly. The star having sexual contact with the nieces they loved (and other underage girls) couldn’t possibly have been a motive to make the tape public. Instead it was all about money.

  “The operative theory by the people around Rob,” one of Kelly’s handlers told me years later, “was that Rob and Barry had a bad falling-out over Aaliyah. But what really pushed Barry over the edge about really wanting to destroy Rob was that Aaliyah died, and the guilt he felt. Even though Rob had nothing to do with that, obviously, Barry had a lot of guilt about that whole thing, because he had pushed the two of them together initially. He may not have been expecting the way that it turned out, but he knew Rob pretty well. As screwed up as Rob was, and as Byzantine as all that psychology was, I think Barry’s psychology is equally Byzantine. . . . He knew that Rob was enormously talented and that he was a real meal ticket, and he had sense that Aaliyah had it, too. He put them together, and yeah, don’t worry about the other stuff.”

  When the BET interview touched on this alleged conspiracy to blackmail and bring him down, Kelly shifted uneasily in his chair, caught off guard and unprepared. “You had said that you believe that there is a smear campaign out against you,” Gordon began, “that you think people are out to get you. Who is ‘they’?”

  “Well, I’m gonna be very honest.” Now Kelly talked quickly and stumbled over his words. “I know a lot of things that, uh, unfortunately, I just can’t discuss, ’cause, uh, I can’t get on TV claiming this person or that person. I just can’t say names and who’s doin’ this to me.”

  “You have in the past mentioned your former agent, though,” Gordon said, referring to Hankerson, Kelly’s ex-manager. “Yes, I have,” Kelly said. He began fidgeting nervously with his hands and blinking a lot. Gordon named him. “Barry Hankerson. And your suggestion is that he was behind some of this. Do you believe that he is behind any of this smear campaign?”

  “Well, you know what, that’s something I have to let my lawyers handle,” Kelly said. He looked frightened. “My lawyers are handling that, you know? And, and, looking into that, and, unfortunately, man, like I say, I’m, I’m biting my teeth here. I wish that I could say a lot of things. Because I owe it to my fans. That’s why I’m here. I owe it to people. I owe it to my family and myself. To be here. And I’m makin’ a big step to be here and talk about this. It’s just that I’m doin’ it with a hand behind my back. I can’t say a lot of things, unfortunately. And I apologize for that. But you know, I hope that people understand how the legal thing goes. Especially when you’re a celebrity, the first thing they do is tell you, you can’t say anything. I’m not even supposed to be here talkin’ about it. But I, I just feel I have to say something.”

  Gordon didn’t stop. “I mention Barry Hankerson only in the sense that you had mentioned him publicly before. There’s been word that an old protégé—” The interviewer was about to name Sparkle when Kelly nervously interjected. “I never said Barry Hankerson.”

  “You tell me if you said this,” Gordon said. He proceeded to read part of a quote from a radio interview Kelly had given, which actually didn’t name Hankerson. Gordon, quoting from Kelly’s own interview, read, “I’ve got an ex-manager on my back. People are trying to make money off my music and my name in a very, very negative way. I’ve been blackmailed for the last four years. I didn’t give in. I’m still not going to give in. A lot of people are very jealous of me and they’re trying to destroy me.” Gordon looked up from the transcript he’d just read and stared at Kelly. “Did you not mean Barry Hankerson there?”

  “Well, like I say, because of the legal thing, I can’t just name names,” Kelly said. He had started to sweat. “I’ve had a lot of managers in the past, but right now I can’t, I can’t say this man’s name. I wish that I could. Believe me, I wish that I could. The human, just the regular guy, Robert, wants to. But if I’m payin’ lawyers to clear this and make sure I’m okay and all that, then I have to follow some advice.”

  Less than a month later, on the afternoon of June 4, State’s Attorney Dick Devine told Sun-Times editor Michael Cooke that indictments against Kelly would be announced the following day. Abdon and I broke the scoop that morning, scoring for the first time the prime place on page one, or “the wood,” in newspaper jargon antiquated even then. The indictment charged Kelly with twenty-one counts of making child pornography: seven counts of videotaping each specific sex act, seven counts of producing the video for each specific sex act, and seven counts of soliciting an underage partner for each specific sex act. He faced a prison term of up to fifteen years and a fine of $100,000 if convicted.

  “While police and other family members who were cooperating with t
he investigation grew impatient for prosecutors to charge Kelly, the Cook County State’s Attorney’s office took months, it said, trying to make sure it had an ironclad case,” Abdon wrote. “Prosecutors were haunted by a case fourteen years ago, when they had a similarly uncooperative witness who had been taped having sex with a man when she was underage.” (This was before the Mel Reynolds case.) “Prosecutors charged him anyway, and he was acquitted.”

  Abdon and I attended the standing-room-only press conference on the afternoon of June 5 at CPD headquarters, 3510 South Michigan Avenue. Top city and state law enforcement officials crowded the podium, and after Chicago Police Supt. Terry Hillard introduced them all, he said he wanted to provide some background. “We’re here today to announce the indictment of Chicago-based singer Robert Kelly. Back in February, the Chicago Sun-Times contacted the Chicago Police Department to tell us of a tape they received that features R. Kelly performing sex acts with a minor. The Sun-Times provided a copy of the tape to us.”

  Sitting at the left end of the fourth row, Abdon and I winced. We’d been hoping the lede would be that a video provided evidence leading to an indictment after a long police investigation of Kelly’s sexual contact with underage girls. “Fuck!” Abdon whispered. “They’re making this about us!” They also were making it all about one teenage girl on one videotape, with nothing about the pattern of behavior we’d reported.

  “It’s unfortunate to see Mr. Kelly’s talents go to waste, but make no mistake, these acts are serious crimes,” Superintendent Hillard said. “[A]nyone who is selling this tape, as well as anyone who has purchased it, is now in possession of child pornography. It would be my advice to dispose of these tapes.” Like the earlier videotapes, bootlegged copies of the one with Reshona had begun to appear for sale on the streets.