Soulless

by Jim Derogatis

  After opening night, the threesome in a cell disappeared from Kelly’s sets through the rest of the tour. The singer arrived two and a half hours late for night two, and he left early, before the closing bow with Jay-Z. Kelly complained that Jay-Z’s sound and lighting crews sabotaged his parts of the show. The tour’s producers canceled the next date in Cincinnati. A week later, Kelly stopped a show in St. Louis and got into a screaming match with the tech crew, Post-Dispatch music critic Kevin C. Johnson told me. Jay-Z finished the performance with his tribute to dead legends, while Kelly went to a nearby McDonald’s that had just closed for the night.

  The singer persuaded the Mickey D’s manager not only to reopen for his crew, but to allow him to hand orders to customers at the drive-through window. “It was on the radio,” Genson bragged to Abdon. “People were running out of their houses to have R. Kelly serve them.”

  Kelly seemed to be coming undone. The production company canceled the next two shows in Milwaukee and Hartford, then the tour lurched forward again, arriving in Jay-Z’s hometown for his triumphant return to Madison Square Garden on October 29, 2004. During his second solo set, Kelly fled the stage, saying two people in the crowd were waving guns at him. When he tried to return, Jay-Z’s friend Tyran Smith pepper-sprayed him. The singer went to St. Vincent’s Hospital while Jay-Z ended the show with several superstar guests from the audience.

  The next morning, the best of both worlds gave separate, dueling interviews to New York’s Hot 97 radio station. Jay-Z said audiences preferred him to Kelly, which made his partner jealous. Kelly complained again about production issues. The rapper kicked him off the tour, rebranded it as Jay-Z and Friends, and tapped Pharrell Williams, Snoop Dogg, and Kanye West to complete the remaining dates. Kelly sued Jay-Z, and Jay-Z sued Kelly. A judge dismissed the rapper’s lawsuit, and Jay-Z settled Kelly’s claim out of court. Lawyers did not disclose the terms, and Jay-Z never has spoken publicly about Kelly since.

  Through all the reporting Abdon and I did on R. Kelly for the Chicago Sun-Times, our colleague Mary Mitchell was one of our staunchest allies, and an inspiration whenever we felt as if we were banging our heads against the wall. Mary grew up in public housing on the South Side, raised four children, and spent two decades working as a legal secretary before enrolling at Columbia College Chicago in 1989 at age forty-one. She found her passion in journalism, and she was badass. “There are voiceless people in the world,” she said, “and I was a natural at hearing those stories.” Since starting at the paper in 1991 as an education reporter, she’d risen to become a member of the editorial board and a columnist. Dedicated and fearless, she’d also battled and beaten cancer. I knew I’d earned my bona fides after the first story about Kelly when Mary stopped me in the hall and said “Great work.” Previously, we’d never even talked.

  In her columns, Mary questioned Kelly flouting his spirituality as if it forgave his continued sinning. She hammered the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation for booking Kelly for a benefit concert; criticized mothers “who were either so impressed with Kelly’s stardom or so negligent of their daughter’s activities that they failed to protect them from a sexual predator”; and blasted absent fathers “not there to protect their daughters from lecherous older men.” She compared the situation with Kelly to that of predatory Catholic priests, holding readers partly responsible. “Both the church and the community failed to hold the offenders accountable until the complaints erupted like a volcano.” She also repeatedly noted that the singer was emblematic of a much larger problem. “Kelly may be the mama’s boy who can do no wrong in the black community, but he is also the poster child for the dysfunctional relationship that has developed between adult men and girls in our society. Despite statutory rape laws, a growing number of girls are getting pregnant by grown men.” And that was all within the first two years after our first story.

  “I got a lot of hate mail. The community was after my head,” Mary told me years later. “There’s this desperate need for the black community to have a hero. That’s why Bill Cosby was out there for so long. Same thing with Kelly. The black community didn’t want to deal with this being a form of sex-trafficking girls. I was trying to get them to understand the seriousness of it, that it wasn’t just two white guys, you and Abdon, trying to bring down a black guy. I always saw that as a problem.”

  “We failed as a community,” Common told TMZ in early 2019. The Chicago rapper is known as one of the most conscious men in hip-hop, and he’s always been one of my favorites. Even he didn’t see the problem with Kelly until too late. “We knew these things were happening. Instead of trying to free these young ladies and stop this thing going on, we were just, like, man, rocking to the music. I’m guilty of that, too, myself. I didn’t speak out against it.”

  Mary Mitchell did, and she was never alone among black women in Chicago and elsewhere. “I just had a loud megaphone,” she told me. “So did you, and you used it. You made victims visible and amplified their voices. That’s what journalism is supposed to do.”

  In April 2003, ten months after Kelly’s indictment, Mary scooped Abdon and me when she interviewed three of the singer’s in-laws for a disturbing story about how he treated his wife, Andrea. Kelly married twenty-two-year-old Andrea Lee, a dancer in his touring troupe, in 1996. By age twenty-nine, she’d given birth to his three children, Jaya, born in 1996; Joann, born in 1998; and Robert Jr., born in 2002, but sources in his crew told me she was almost a nonentity in his life. They called her “Puppydog,” rather than her preferred nickname, “Drea.” They said (and she later confirmed in many print and television interviews) that she had to knock before entering any room in the house on George Street or the mansion in Olympia Fields. Photographers almost never captured the couple together in public, and many of Kelly’s fans didn’t know he was married until the widespread publicity after his indictment.

  “His wife was still excusing Rob, Rob and his friends,” the singer’s confidante Kim Dulaney said in 2004. “His wife was a Stepford.” (Ira Levin’s 1974 novel and the subsequent film The Stepford Wives portrayed the robotic women of a Connecticut suburb who submitted totally to their controlling husbands.) “I think she knows Rob, I can say that. I think she knows,” Dulaney said of Kelly’s sexual contact with underage women.

  When Mary Mitchell talked to Andrea’s mother, grandfather, and aunt, they said Kelly didn’t allow them to visit her at home, and he didn’t permit Andrea to speak to them on the phone. In 2003, they still hadn’t met their sixteen-month-old grandson, Robert Jr. “The last time I talked to her was over two years ago on the phone,” said Gerri Cruz, Andrea’s mother. “She was crying hysterically and violently. Of course, you are worried when you go from talking to a person every day to not talking to them, period.”

  Cruz had recently asked the Olympia Fields Police Department to perform a well-being check on her daughter, and they reported Andrea was fine. “I don’t know if my child is under the influence. I don’t know if she is being controlled. I don’t know if people are watching her. I don’t know if she is being brainwashed,” Cruz told Mary. “If everything is all right, then she should call her mother and her father. I find this behavior bizarre.”

  In September 2005, thirty-nine months after Kelly’s indictment, Andrea petitioned Cook County Circuit Court for an order of protection from her husband of nine years. She charged that he repeatedly slapped and hit her when she asked for a divorce. “I’m now fearful of him and I want to get away safe and be happy,” she wrote in large, looping handwriting. “No, I never called the police, I thought it would get better.” In even larger scrawl, Andrea requested “No contact by any means!” for herself and “Supervised visits only!” for her children. Several weeks later, after the couple reportedly reconciled, she rescinded the request for a protection order.

  “Robert needed her to play a role during the trial, or at least make it be like he had this happy family at home,” one of Kelly’s former associates told me. (Andrea did n
ot attend the trial.) “One way or the other, he convinced her to stay a little bit longer.”

  Almost five years after Robert’s indictment, in May 2007, journalist Natalie Moore asked Andrea about her husband’s case during a lengthy interview that ran as a cover story in Essence. “C’mon. Who would believe all that?” Andrea said of the charges. “That’s why they call them allegations.” She grew indignant when Moore asked if she’d seen the videotape. “Why would you ask that question of a woman married with children? It’s ludicrous to ask me a question like that.”

  The couple finalized their divorce a little more than a year later, weeks after the end of the trial. In 2018, Andrea began to speak to the media about the physical and mental abuse she says she suffered from Kelly during their marriage. She once contemplated suicide because things got so bad. Her friend Gem Pratts and manager Eric France—both accompanied her to speaking engagements for a time, along with another friend who serves as her stylist—told me Andrea could not talk to me because “some things are still just too painful for her.” In dream hampton’s 2019 docuseries, Surviving R. Kelly, Andrea says there are “certain things here I’m not willing to talk about.” Asked if she ever saw underage girls with her husband or in their homes, she says, “He never brought any of them around me. He kept it away from me for a reason.”

  After that series aired, a key member of the prosecution team for the 2008 trial told me one of their biggest regrets was that they could not convince Andrea to testify. “Even at the end when you could tell their marriage was breaking down, we made some last-ditch efforts to get her on board, and we were told in no uncertain terms, ‘Get the fuck out of here.’ To see her now, talking about what a monster he was . . . Maybe even just having her on our side could have changed that.”

  As he continued waiting for his day in court, Robert Kelly had plenty of other problems with both blood relatives and people he considered family. In early 2006, three and a half years after his indictment, his younger half brother, Carey, released an interview with Drahma, a DVD-based music magazine, claiming Robert emotionally and physically abused Andrea, had “a problem” with underage girls, and often showed the videotape at the heart of the indictment to his friends. He also tried to convince Carey to take the blame as the man who appeared on the tape, Carey said, even though the half brothers don’t resemble each other very much. “I got a call a year, year and a half ago from my older brother who wanted me to do some shit pertaining to this case that was going to leave me behind bars,” Carey says in the Drahma interview. “I turned it down. The nigga offered me $50,000, a bullshit record deal, and a house to lie, to perjure myself in a court of law, and I felt this shit wasn’t worth it.”

  According to Carey, Robert had long documented his obsession with underage sex, in “Age Ain’t Nothing but a Number” and other songs. “He’s been telling, ‘I’ve got a problem, because if I love this girl and she’s twelve, that’s all that matters.’ He’s been saying it in his songs, and that’s what makes him the genius that he is,” Carey says. “He speaks shit that other motherfuckers who are on his level can relate to. And I say to America, the criminal justice system, if you let that nigga off, he’s going to do it again, trust me. I bet my life on it.”

  By his own admission, Carey had struggled—he was homeless for a time—and he resented Robert for not helping him launch a rap career. “This is not the first time Carey has made ridiculous accusations against his brother,” R. Kelly’s spokesman Allan Mayer said in response to the Dhrama interview. “We’re not going to dignify them with a comment.”

  Robert’s other half-siblings, Bruce and Theresa, worked on and off for their superstar kin, Bruce as a bodyguard and runner, and Theresa—who has never spoken about Robert publicly—cleaning Robert’s house. In 2015, Bruce sued Robert, claiming he was owed $11,000 in back wages for working as a driver and an assistant, but he continued to defend Robert after they settled that case. Interviewed for Surviving R. Kelly while being held in Cook County Jail on $100,000 bond for theft, burglary, and possession of a controlled substance, Bruce said, “Robert likes younger women. You have people who have fantasies about different things. . . . But that’s just a preference. Everyone has preferences. What is the big deal about my brother?”

  In the fall of 2006, more than four years after the indictment, I got a call from Henry Vaughn, a Chicago man who wanted to give me a scoop about the lawsuit he’d just filed. The son of a South Side Democratic ward boss, Vaughn worked as a security guard, and he claimed to have been a mentor and “uncle” to Robert since Kelly’s teens. They were not actually related, but the singer and his crew called Vaughn “Uncle Henry Love.” He arrived at the new Sun-Times offices in rented space at 350 North Orleans Street wearing a crisp white shirt beneath an impeccably tailored red suit, tie, and top hat, the living embodiment of the city’s stepping scene. Abdon, Mary Mitchell, and I sat with him in a small, gray conference room as he told us he’d gone to a party at Kelly’s Olympia Fields mansion months earlier on February 19 to watch the NBA All-Star Game, and he’d been beaten by Kelly and his bodyguards.

  Uncle Henry showed us an Olympia Fields police report, photos of a bloody lip and other injuries, and paperwork from Advocate Christ Medical Center in south suburban Oak Lawn to back up the account in his legal claim, which demanded compensation for “permanent injuries” from the beating, as well as money he said Kelly promised to pay him for sharing his stepping moves and inspiring the hit “Step in the Name of Love.” Myriad are the accusations against pop stars for stealing other people’s ideas, and every journalist on the beat soon learns to ignore them, but the original version of Kelly’s song does end with the line, “Dedicated to Uncle Henry Love, thank you,” and the remix includes the shout-out, “Henry Love, I see you, yeah!”

  Asked what prompted Kelly to allegedly beat his friend, mentor, and dance instructor, Uncle Henry said he couldn’t be certain, but the argument started when Kelly’s young daughter Jaya danced to amuse his friends at the party, and Uncle Henry criticized Kelly for encouraging her to do it. (Jaya came out as transgender in 2014, and now prefers to be called Kelly’s son, Jay.) “She was all dressed up with tight jeans and makeup on, a seven-year-old girl, dancing on top of the pool table,” Uncle Henry said. “It was ridiculous. She told my lady, ‘I’m having a show next week. When you come, bring a hundred dollars.’ Nobody would tell this, but I ain’t scared to tell the truth. Shame the devil!”

  Olympia Fields police told Abdon they responded to a call from the mansion the night of the party but declined to file charges when Kelly’s bodyguards and others at the gathering said Uncle Henry had gotten drunk and had to be subdued. They found the singer’s children upstairs, sleeping. Kelly’s spokesman Allan Mayer described Uncle Henry as “a disgruntled former employee and hanger-on” and called the lawsuit “a pathetic collection of half-truths, distortions, and outright lies.” He dismissed the story about Kelly’s daughter dancing at the party as “outrageous nonsense,” but Kelly nevertheless settled Uncle Henry’s claim out of court for an undisclosed sum. Vaughn never spoke about Kelly in public again.

  Kelly’s new spokesman, Mayer, had replaced Regina Daniels, who for years had stood among Kelly’s most ardent defenders. Regina and her husband, George, split from the star not long before his indictment in 2002, issuing a press release saying they’d severed all ties with Kelly, and cryptically adding, “a line has been crossed.” In 2008, George Daniels talked to a Los Angeles radio station and explained what that meant. “He crossed the line with my daughter. It didn’t get to the extreme of that video or else I wouldn’t be here, if you know what I’m talking about.” Slamming his fist on the table, he made it clear he would have beaten Kelly to a pulp. “The reason that I’m talking about this, it’s not just for me, it’s not for my wife, it’s not for my daughter, but it’s for other fathers and mothers, because it doesn’t have to be a superstar, it could be the dude on the corner. There are guys who sit around and give you
r child a couple of bucks to go to school and then wait until they get a little older, then they set that trap.”

  Maxine Daniels, George’s daughter and Regina’s stepdaughter, talked to World Entertainment News Network several weeks later, detailing the affair she said she had with Kelly when she was twenty years old. “My stepmother and father didn’t know about my relationship with the singer because I knew and he knew that they wouldn’t approve . . . so I tried to keep it a secret, but when my stepmother found out about our relationship, she resigned because she felt that Rob had ‘crossed the line’ by dating a girl that he has known since she was seven years old. . . . She was Rob’s publicist for fourteen years and always considered Rob not just a client, but family. And Rob thought of my dad like a father.”

  Maxine Daniels said the affair with Kelly had been a “serious misjudgment,” but she’d been “swept up by his charming and generous ways.”

  “It’s hard to take seriously the moral outrage expressed by George and Regina Daniels over R. Kelly’s relationship with Mr. Daniels’s adult daughter, Maxine,” spokesman Allan Mayer said. “The fact is that they had no problem with the relationship—indeed, they encouraged it—while Ms. Daniels was on Mr. Kelly’s payroll.”

  When the Best of Both Worlds tour fell apart in the fall of 2004, Kelly came off the road and did what he always did, returning to the recording studio in the basement of his Olympia Fields mansion. Nine months after his last show with Jay-Z, and thirty-seven months after his indictment, Kelly released TP.3 Reloaded. The title harkened back to his earlier, most lascivious Jive Records releases, 12 Play and TP-2.com. With songs such as “Sex in the Kitchen,” “Sex Weed,” and “(Sex) Love Is What We Makin’,” Kelly didn’t hide his obsession, but the first five chapters of “Trapped in the Closet,” his soon-to-be-notorious, never-ending “hip-hopera,” garnered the most attention. Many music critics loved it.