Soulless

by Jim Derogatis

  Writing for Pitchfork, Rob Mitchum asked, “Is R. Kelly a joke or a genius? Does he really expect us to forget his recent unpleasantness”—an exceedingly poor choice of words for allegations of statutory rape and making child pornography—“or does he just not care what we think? Given the charges against him, how is he still recruiting A-list guest stars? How many metaphors for sex can one man think up?” The review’s rating of 7.8 on Pitchfork’s 10-point scale answered the critic’s rhetorical questions. “For all the absurdity of his ‘Trapped in the Closet’ cycle and his endless stock of creative horniness, the man is an absolute master of his medium.”

  Kelly had a deep connection to closets, both physical and metaphorical. He’d spent countless hours honing his music in the closet-size “guitar room” at Kenwood Academy, and he said he often slept in his closet, as he did for a month after Aaliyah’s death. “Everyone has a secret,” he says of the closet as metaphor in Soulacoaster. “Everyone has a closet that he or she is trapped inside of, and everyone—believe it or not—wants out of that closet.”

  “Trapped in the Closet,” which Kelly also called “a ghetto soap opera,” kept expanding. Eventually, it followed the peccadillos of a horny and adulterous cast of dozens, including a pastor, a cop, a midget, and a central protagonist named Sylvester. Kelly sang almost all of the roles himself.

  In addition to his own prolific output, Kelly continued writing for and producing other artists, including rappers Ludacris, LL Cool J, and Lil Wayne; singers Ciara and Syleena Johnson; and, in perhaps the most unlikely collaboration, Missy Elliott, who’d coproduced the album Aaliyah made after she split from Kelly. Talks were even under way for Kelly to work with Whitney Houston (which finally happened after the trial). Double Up, Kelly’s ninth album for Jive Records, included guest appearances by Snoop Dogg, Nelly, Usher, T.I., T-Pain, Chamillionaire, Kid Rock, Swizz Beatz, Keyshia Cole, and Polow da Don.

  Few of Kelly’s peers seemed to have a problem working with a man accused of making child pornography. For some, the accusations even became a joke. As Aisha Harris wrote years later in the New York Times, “[T]hose who laughed at Kelly were able to ignore the charges against him.”

  Near the top of his opening monologue at the MTV Video Music Awards in 2003, host Chris Rock pointed out three of the many celebrities in the audience. “Sit the Olsen Twins down here, you gotta sit R. Kelly way up there!” For years, Cedric the Entertainer’s stand-up routine included a bit in which he imagined Kelly as a horny preacher, and in the 2004 film Barbershop 2: Back in Business, he cracked, “Yeah, R. Kelly was set up. He set up the camera!” Comedian Dave Chappelle mocked Kelly in 2003 on his Comedy Central sketch show with a video entitled “(I Wanna) Pee on You,” and the same year, cartoonist Aaron McGruder took aim at Kelly in the second episode of The Boondocks, the animated series based on his comic strip.

  In an episode called “The Trial of Robert Kelly,” airing on Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim, McGruder’s version of the singer wears the bandit mask he first sported in the video he made with yet another collaborator, rapper Cassidy. He’s defended by an animated lawyer resembling civil rights activist William Kunstler (voiced by Adam West), while a trio of black activists protesting Kelly resemble Cornel West, Tony Brown, and Dick Gregory. Defending the singer are a group of people grilling on barbecues, listening to R&B, and holding misspelt signs such as “Not Gilltee.” One overweight black woman swoons over her musical heartthrob. When asked why she supports Kelly, she says, “’Cause he good!” Kelly is acquitted, and in the end, Chicago-born Huey, the perpetually vexed ten-year-old hero and political conscience of The Boondocks voiced by Regina King, declares, “Every famous nigga that gets arrested is not Nelson Mandela. Yes, the government conspires to put a lot of innocent black men in jail on fallacious charges. But R. Kelly is not one of those men.”

  Even though some of the many jokes about Kelly had an edge, most reduced his crimes to his fetishes—urination and videotaping sex acts—ignoring the far more troubling charges of a pattern of pursuing underage girls for sex. The insidious fact, Aisha Harris wrote in the New York Times, is “it’s easier (and safer) to poke fun at a grown man’s fetish than to wrestle with claims that he performed his fetish on a minor.”

  Kelly continued to sell new music and, some said, join in laughing at himself. Double Up was released in May 2007, almost sixty months after his indictment; he intended the title as a pun on the joys of both double albums and threesomes. Tracks such as “Get Dirty,” “Freaky in the Club,” “Sweet Tooth,” and “I’m a Flirt (Remix)” once again mined familiar hot-and-horny themes, and Pitchfork rated the disc a 6.7. “In a sense, it seems more apropos to judge Double Up as a comedy record than as a pop record,” critic Ryan Dombal wrote.

  In Soulacoaster, Kelly brags, “The two songs that got lots of attention were the lines where I once again messed with the metaphors. ‘The Zoo’ was my very own version of the film Jurassic Park: ‘Girl, I got you so wet, it’s like a rain forest / Like Jurassic Park except I’m your sex-a-sauraus. . . .’ The other song was ‘Sex Planet’: ‘Jupiter, Pluto, Venus, and Saturn / I’m leaving Earth to explore your galaxy / Ten to zero, blast off, here we go / We’ll be climaxing until we reach Mercury.’ For reasons I can’t explain, the song became a big hit with indie-rockers and made a number of their Top 10 lists in 2007.”

  Only three months later, in August 2007, Kelly released a new “video album” with ten more chapters of “Trapped in the Closet,” and cable television’s Independent Film Channel ran a compilation film of all twenty-two chapters in heavy rotation. The list of all the music Kelly recorded between his indictment and his trial still doesn’t end there. His “official” releases sold a combined eight million copies in the United States, according to the Recording Industry Association of America, impressive business in the dying days of the old-school music industry, when physical product yielded to digital downloads (and, eventually, to streaming). But Kelly also recorded two other albums that he floated to fans for free on the Net: Loveland in 2002, and 12 Play: 4th Quarter in 2008.

  “Sources close to the Kelly camp said that some of the Loveland themes and lyrics would present awkward connotations in the context of the singer’s legal situation,” Geoff Boucher reported in the Los Angeles Times, and that’s why Kelly decided not to release it as a CD. Age seventy-seven and dying of cancer in March 2019, Ed Genson told Sun-Times columnist Neil Steinberg that he “vetted” Kelly’s recordings while serving as the star’s attorney. “I listened to them, which ones would make a judge mad,” Genson said. Some critics thought the problem was hypersexualized jams such as “Come to Daddy” and “Make You My Baby,” but the most remarkable and problematic song may have been “I Believe I Can Fly (Remix),” a nearly ten-minute operetta in a similar mode to “Trapped in the Closet,” with Kelly portraying all of the characters.

  The remix sounds very little like the original “I Believe I Can Fly,” and it amounts to a lengthy confession to unnamed sins as a character named Robert appears before St. Peter at the pearly gates on the day of reckoning. The music is ornate and mock-classical, as perhaps befits the soundtrack in heaven. “I’m sorry for all of the wrong I’ve done / So can you please forgive me / And deliver me from my ways?” Robert sings in his familiar range. Then, he responds as St. Peter in a basso profundo. “We don’t welcome sinners in this place. . . . You are a heartless thug and we don’t want you here!”

  Turning to his dead mother, Robert pleads for her to intervene, but she asks, “Now, son, tell me, do you believe the Truth?” He assures her he does, and Jesus finally comes to his rescue, offering absolution, and encouraging him to “stand up and claim victory.”

  CHAPTER 10

  THE STATE OF ILLINOIS V. ROBERT SYLVESTER KELLY

  With R. Kelly’s defense team having exhausted their delaying tactics after six years, and with Judge Vincent Gaughan often siding with them in sealed rulings limiting the evidence and testimony he would allow in the trial
so as not to prejudice the jury, The State of Illinois v. Robert Sylvester Kelly finally was set to begin in the spring of 2008. It would take place at Twenty-Sixth and Cal on the fifth floor of the Cook County Criminal Court Building, one of the grandest, most storied structures in Chicago, a city lousy with such places. Constructed of limestone trucked in from Indiana, the seven-story tower opened a few miles south of the Loop in 1929, weeks after the Saint Valentine’s Day Massacre. Built at the then-staggering cost of $7.5 million, it sat on a strip of land that, not coincidentally, happened to be owned by the family of Anton Cermak, leader of the Cook County Democratic Party, and a future mayor of Chicago.

  The county courts had outgrown their previous home in the Loop, and the new courts building bordering the West Side neighborhood of Little Village, rapidly becoming one of the city’s most vibrant Latinx communities, quickly became one of the busiest judicial centers in the United States. Judges in the tower’s thirty-one courtrooms decide twenty-two thousand cases a year, from street-corner busts for possession of weed, to multiple murders like the Brown’s Chicken massacre. Al Capone made numerous appearances there, and his sneering picture hangs in one of the marble hallways between two solid-brass light fixtures. John Wayne Gacy also strolled the corridors in chains, but court clerks preferred not to think about his trial for the brutal sexual assault, torture, and murder of at least thirty-three teenage boys and young men in the seventies. They were more likely to mention rubbing elbows with Harrison Ford during the filming of The Fugitive in 1993.

  Designed to impress upon visitors the awesome power of the law, Greek and Roman flourishes abound. The building boasts eight huge columns on its front façade, and its top-floor windows are framed by statues of classical figures symbolizing law, justice, liberty, truth, might, love, wisdom, and peace. Judges preside from thronelike benches that look down on courtrooms filled with dark rosewood paneling, but the building isn’t always as regal as it appears at first glance. Stifling in the summer, it’s freezing during the winter. Scurrying mice sometimes distract lawyers as they address the court, and jurors have been known to shriek when a huge cockroach drops from the ceiling.

  In the weeks before jury selection began in the Kelly trial, Judge Gaughan demanded that the county paint Courtroom 500 and spiff up the hallway leading from the elevator. He said he wanted the facility to look its best for the world’s press. At his urging, a maintenance crew also reopened and repaired an unused handicap ramp on the ground floor, and he devoted that entrance exclusively to Kelly and his entourage. The judge anticipated throngs of fans and protestors filling the street, and he didn’t want them to harass Kelly. “Not even Oprah Winfrey—who sat on a jury in a murder trial here two years ago—got her own entrance,” Stefano Esposito wrote in the Sun-Times.

  A crowd of about a hundred people came on the trial’s opening and closing days, but most times, only about a dozen diehard Kelly fans and two black activists stood on the sidewalk at Twenty-Sixth and Cal. Najee Ali, executive director of Los Angeles–based Project Islamic HOPE, carried a sign proclaiming “R. Kelly, World’s Greatest Pedophile,” but he failed to attract other protestors. “This has been the loneliest fight I have ever been in,” he told Kayce T. Ataiyero of the Trib. For the first few years of pretrial hearings, Kelly’s spiritual advisor, the Rev. James Meeks, had brought a yellow school bus full of kids from the Rainbow/PUSH Coalition wearing “Free R. Kelly” T-shirts. By the start of testimony, they’d stopped coming.

  Some fans paid a price for supporting the singer. On the first day of the trial, Gaughan threw Kelly’s spokesman Allan Mayer out of the courtroom and threatened to jail him for contempt if he returned. Mayer had angered the judge by giving yet another quote about the star’s innocence to one of the daily papers, violating the gag order Gaughan imposed on both legal teams when proceedings started. One day after the lunch break, as the jury exited the elevator on the fifth floor, a woman who appeared to be homeless and mentally disturbed shouted, “Free R. Kelly!” Jurors said they hadn’t heard her, but the judge ordered sheriff’s deputies to put the woman in cuffs. He sent her to Cook County Jail, right next door to the courthouse, and set bail at $50,000.

  “Only God can judge him,” two older Kelly fans told reporters who asked why they prayed in front of the courthouse on some mornings. The media preferred interviewing two young female regulars who called themselves “R. Kelly’s biggest fans.” Streamwood resident Jerhonda Johnson, who claimed to be eighteen, told anyone who’d listen that prosecutors “don’t have a case, it ain’t him on that tape.” She and her friend, a twenty-three-year-old criminal-justice student at Harold Washington College, shouted, “I love you!” when Kelly walked in or out of his special entrance. The star always smiled and waved. One day, a reporter asked Johnson if she’d date the singer if he asked her out. “Yes! He ain’t even gotta finish the sentence.” And if he wanted to tape her? She paused, then smiled wide. “Just don’t let it go public.”

  Because Sun-Times city editor Don Hayner and media attorney Damon Dunn urged me to stay away, I attended the trial only once. They told Abdon Pallasch to steer clear, too, but he kept “popping in for just a minute,” despite ceding daily coverage to our colleagues Eric Herman and Stefano Esposito. My account of the trial is based on their reporting, as well as Abdon’s observations and interviews I conducted with the attorneys, jurors, reporters, and court personnel. Cameras, video, and audio recorders were not allowed in Cook County Criminal Court, but transcripts of the proceedings are available (at the exorbitant price of four dollars per page). I also relied on some of those, in addition to frequent reports during and after the trial by Jennifer Vineyard for MTV News; Kathy Chaney for the Chicago Defender; Kyra Kyles for RedEye; Josh Levin for Slate; Edward McClelland for Blender; Azam Ahmed, Kayce T. Ataiyero, and Stacy St. Clair for the Tribune; and Kim Janssen for the Daily Southtown.

  “As you know, this is a high-profile case, and if you don’t know, God love you, you’re probably the only person on earth that doesn’t,” Judge Gaughan said with considerable hyperbole at the start of jury selection on May 9, 2008. Picking a jury of twelve of Kelly’s peers and four alternates from a pool of one hundred fifty people took four days and proved contentious. The lawyers and the judge started by quizzing potential jurors if they knew or knew of anyone on the witness list.

  One woman said she knew of Kelly’s former manager and Aaliyah’s uncle, Barry Hankerson. “He was married to Gladys Knight, right?” She remained through several more rounds of questioning before she was excused. A man said he liked my music columns in the Sun-Times and Sound Opinions, the radio show I co-host with Greg Kot of the Trib, thereby disqualifying himself in court (though not in my heart). Asked if she knew anything negative about Kelly, a black female postal worker said, “He and Jay-Z don’t get along.” Lead prosecutor Shauna Boliker disqualified her because she also called Kelly “a musical genius, a pied piper.”

  While attorneys wrangled over the jury, the Pied Piper of R&B sat in court looking disinterested, occasionally doodling on yellow Post-it notes that he shoved into the pockets of his expensive-looking, perfectly tailored suits. Reporters were awed by what seemed to be his endless closet full of these, though given the way most reporters dress, it doesn’t take much to impress them, fashion-wise. The only time Kelly reacted during jury selection came when a middle-aged white woman responded to whether she had an opinion about the singer by saying, “Yes, he’s not very smart.” Kelly turned to her and looked hurt.

  Four well-paid lawyers sat with Kelly at the defense table throughout the trial: Genson, the self-professed dean of local defense attorneys; his office-mate, forty-six-year-old Marc Martin; the rotund, seventy-two-year-old Sam Adam Sr.; and his equally beefy thirty-five-year-old son, Sam Adam Jr. At one point, the defense angrily charged the prosecution with excluding black jurors, although they well knew federal law prohibits discrimination on race or gender. Adam Sr., a white man married to a black woman, angrily made the argument
to Gaughan. “They’ve used fifty percent of their challenges on African Americans!”

  Writing in Slate, Josh Levin compared the bellicose elder member of the Adam family to Uncle Fester. “I like to dress like the jurors,” Adam Sr. said when asked about the old burgundy sport coat he often wore to court. In Blender, Edward McClelland compared him to “a wine stain with arms.” During his long career, Adam Sr. had represented almost as many mobsters as his good friend Ed Genson, and the two had partnered to represent Rep. Mel Reynolds in 1995 and lost. Genson had also lost another, more recent high-profile case that resonated with Abdon and me, when he defended Lord Conrad Black, the Canadian press baron who owned the Sun-Times. Black was convicted of securities fraud in 2007 and eventually sentenced to forty-two months in prison and a fine of $125,000.

  In response to the defense’s charge of racism during jury selection, lead prosecutor Shauna Boliker pointed out that all six of the peremptory challenges by Kelly’s team had removed white jurors. Judge Gaughan deemed both sides “race-neutral” and kept jury selection moving. Now that the trial had finally started, he was not going to let anything slow it down, and he tolerated no distractions or infractions of his rules. On day one, Gaughan ordered Genson to leave the motorized scooter he rode because of his physical disability outside the courtroom. At one point, when Adam Sr. moved a chair in front of the bench so his friend could sit while addressing the judge, Gaughan snapped, “Oh, no, this ain’t the ADA here!” The judge demanded that Genson stand at the lectern like all the other attorneys, and to hell with the Americans with Disabilities Act.