Soulless

by Jim Derogatis

  The 2006 comedy Little Man digitally morphed the head of an adult comedian, Marlon Wayans, onto the body of a dwarf actor playing a baby. Made at least six years after Kelly’s home recording at the heart of the trial, Little Man had a $64 million Hollywood budget, and it still looked absurd. (It also wasn’t remotely funny.)

  Striking out again with the Little Man question, Adam Jr. tried the missing mole. Looking at the photo of Kelly’s back, Jamison suggested it could have been a mark on the print, or “a cancerous mole, maybe.” Kelly laughed, his usually stoic court façade cracking. Cross-examination ended after Jamison admitted that, yes, she also received gifts from the star, including a hundred dollars on her thirteenth birthday.

  The parade of people identifying Reshona continued with Aubrey Hampton, a member of the girls’ high school basketball team. “There’s no question,” Hampton said, pointing out the unique way her friend and teammate licked her bottom lip. Hampton’s mother, Mary Kay Jerit, worked for the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services, the state’s child protection agency. Jerit testified that she recognized Reshona when she watched an unmarked copy of the tape she found in her daughter Aubrey’s room, and immediately “threw it in the trash.” She did not say if she did anything else, like bringing the case to the attention of her bosses, but Abdon and I wondered if she’d been the anonymous source at DCFS who’d emailed us about Reshona years earlier.

  Tjada Burnett, best friends with one of Reshona’s aunts, Charlotte Edwards, also identified the girl in the tape, but Adam Jr. tried to confuse her chronology on cross-examination. She said Reshona got braces after she appeared in the tape, but the defense attorney showed jurors a photo of Reshona looking younger and already wearing braces.

  Raven Gengler had been another of Reshona’s best friends since junior high, and they went on to become star players on the Huskies, their high school basketball team. Sitting in the witness box, Gengler was nearly as tall as Judge Gaughan, though his chair stood a foot higher than hers. She was “one-hundred-percent sure” Reshona appeared in the tape, she said on direct examination, but she broke down in tears when Genson questioned her on cross, doubting her ability to identify the victim because she hadn’t seen or spoken to Reshona in six years. That didn’t make a lot of sense, since the tape was now at least nine years old.

  Gengler acknowledged that she hadn’t wanted to testify. “It’s very upsetting. It’s very upsetting to my family. I just wanted it go away.” Finally excused, the twenty-three-year-old woman let out a very teenaged “Oh, my God,” expressing exasperation, disgust, amazement at the spectacle, or all three.

  Jacques Conway identified the girl in the video as the starting point guard on the basketball team he coached in 2000. The United Methodist pastor, school board president, and retired police sergeant said Reshona had been fourteen or fifteen in the video, and that Kelly came to the team’s final home game to see her play. “She was as sweet and nice a person as could be?” Adam Jr. asked. Clearly a man who actually knew teenagers and their mercurial moods, Conway elicited a laugh. “At times,” he said. He added that he never saw anything inappropriate between Kelly and Reshona, but he did notice that her parents seemed very concerned about her.

  The defense had mixed success during cross-examination while trying to refute the testimony by Reshona’s relatives. Her uncle, Sparkle’s forty-four-year-old brother, Bennie Edwards Sr., admitted he’d recently been arrested for possessing crack. He had trouble recalling significant events. He took ten seconds to remember when he was born, and he got his son’s birthday wrong. “I don’t recall,” he replied to most of Genson’s questions, including some he had just answered for the prosecution.

  Genson asked Edwards Sr. how he could say his niece appeared on the tape if he had such a hard time retaining information. “She’s my blood. Why wouldn’t I remember? Am I on trial here? I told the truth. It looks like Reshona is on the tape. It looks like R. Kelly is on the tape.”

  While we were admittedly armchair quarterbacks, Abdon and I always wondered why the prosecutors didn’t ask every one of their witnesses if they’d heard Kelly call the girl on the tape “Shona.” That struck us as pretty strong evidence.

  Chicago Police Officer Delores Gibson held up better on the stand than her former husband, Bennie Edwards Sr. She said she and Bennie learned about the tape in December 2001, the same time Sparkle called to tell me about it. Sparkle had told me she’d called her brother Bennie and asked him to call their sister, Reshona’s mother. Gibson admitted she didn’t immediately report the tape to her superiors at CPD. “It was very sensitive. The mother didn’t want to cooperate, and neither did the father.”

  Adam Jr. tore into Gibson on cross, attacking her credibility, suggesting the family intended to use a phony tape to extort money from the singer, and hammering away at why she didn’t file a police report. “You are a police officer and your niece is severely violated and you’re telling us you didn’t want anything to do with it? Come on, officer! You can do better than that!” Gibson calmly replied that she did speak to investigators only a few weeks later. “You knew Sparkle had an ax to grind and was running around with the tape so she could try to make money, didn’t you?” Adam Jr. asked. Officer Gibson stayed cool. “What I do know: That there was an act committed that involved a family member. Something needed to be done about that. I took the action that was needed at the time.”

  Like almost all of Kelly’s alleged victims, Reshona had been an aspiring musician, a member of a quartet called 4 the Cause with three of her cousins, including Bennie Edwards Jr., who played bass with Lionel Richie at the time of the trial. Prosecutors showed a 1998 music video for the group’s cover of Ben E. King’s “Stand by Me,” which became a minor hit in Germany. Contradicting the photo the defense showed, Reshona didn’t wear braces in the clip. Edwards Jr. testified that the girl in the tape “favored” his relative, and the man “favored” Kelly. Genson criticized him for not definitively identifying them. “It wasn’t her, was it?” Reshona’s cousin and bandmate shifted uncomfortably. “It looks like her,” he said.

  Reshona’s aunt, thirty-three-year-old Stephanie “Sparkle” Edwards, took the stand in full, glamorous pop-star regalia, the same way she’d come to the Sun-Times the day we watched the tape in the paper’s video closet. As she had that day, she cried often while prosecutors led her through her story. A sheriff’s deputy handed her a box of tissues.

  Many members of the Landfair and Edwards families had big musical ambitions, Sparkle said. She split from Kelly after the release of the self-titled, half-million-selling debut he produced for her in 1998. Before that falling-out, she introduced the star to her niece Reshona one night at the house on George Street, when they gathered to watch the Chicago Bulls in the NBA Finals. Sparkle wasn’t sure if it was the team’s fifth or sixth championship run, in 1997 or 1998, so her niece was either twelve or thirteen. “He liked her spirit,” Sparkle said. “She was a very jolly person at the time. She was my heart.”

  After Sparkle broke from Kelly, she said his manager Barry Hankerson facilitated her move to Motown Records for her next album, Told You So. It was a better record, but a commercial disappointment. For the last few years, she’d been singing backing vocals in concert for another Hankerson client, Toni Braxton. The Landfair and Edwards families had been “thick as thieves, you couldn’t break the chain,” but Sparkle testified that a rift opened after she got a call from a lawyer, “Buddy something,” who sent someone to her apartment to show her the videotape, then left with it.

  That testimony differed slightly from what Sparkle told me in 2001, and I went back to my notes and recording of that interview. She had not mentioned a call from Buddy Meyers, just that the man who visited her left Meyers’s card. Maybe she said “call” on the stand and meant “visit from a man who claimed to have been sent by Buddy.” Then again, Sparkle has now given several different versions of her first encounter with the tape. After the trial in 2008, she did
not talk publicly about it again until Surviving R. Kelly in 2019. After it aired, she began doing a lot of interviews to talk about the docuseries and her single “We Are Ready,” a powerful anthem dedicated to women who have fought and survived abuse. In some of those interviews, she said she learned about the tape when a reporter called her. It was the other way around. Unfortunately, she declined to talk to me again for this book.

  Sparkle told the court she recognized Reshona in the video, but her sister and brother-in-law didn’t seem to care, and she hadn’t spoken to them since. She later told McClelland in Blender that the last time she’d seen Reshona, at her grandparents’ home in 2006, her niece had looked away, put her head down, and walked out of the room. In Surviving R. Kelly, she says the singer offered her “in the high six figures” to praise him in the media instead of testifying. “I didn’t take the money because I can’t be bought. I’ma stand up for my family.” She wasn’t asked about this attempted payoff on the stand, sources told me, because Judge Gaughan had ruled it inadmissible.

  Defense attorney Ed Genson once bragged to Abdon that Kelly’s legal fees would pay to put his grandkids through college, and he earned his money cross-examining Sparkle. He attempted to paint a portrait of a disgruntled artist blackmailing the star for revenge. Sparkle kept her composure, insisting that despite her split from Kelly, “He was my homeboy. We were still cool.” Genson scoffed. “You weren’t angry you’d been terminated?” Sparkle said no, repeating that Hankerson helped her land a new contract at Motown, the label that had made his ex-wife, Gladys Knight, a star. “Was part of the deal you were talking about doing something bad to Robert?” Genson asked. Absolutely not, Sparkle insisted.

  The tension mounted as Genson turned to the tape, reprising the Little Man defense. “You have no idea if that tape was put together from tapes of old footage, tapes of other people, in order to make money off Robert, do you?” Sparkle held firm. “Sir, that’s Robert and Reshona on that tape. I know my family.” Genson persisted. “You know and believe that your niece had Robert give her money to have sex?” he asked. “Just like he made her do! She’s a robot on this tape.” Genson wouldn’t back down. “You know that your niece is taking money for sex?”

  “I know who made the tape. Robert made the tape!” Sparkle said. “He passed her money—” Genson began, but Sparkle cut him off. “Like a prostitute!” That thought triggered her the same way it did when she and I watched the tape in the video closet. “You don’t like Robert!” Genson shouted. He suggested again that Sparkle hoped to profit from the video. “Sweetie, I am not trying to get any money with this,” she sneered. “I am not your sweetie!” Genson shot back. Judge Gaughan interrupted as the exchange escalated, but Genson kept talking. “Mr. Genson, you’re not listening!” the judge snapped. Kelly, who rarely looked at Sparkle, stared straight ahead, expressionless.

  The week ended on a quieter note, with the prosecution’s three technical witnesses. State investigator Alexandra Guerrero testified about photos she took of the Looney Tunes mural in Kelly’s basketball court on George Street—reporters didn’t know why, but it would become apparent—and two video experts authenticated the tape in an attempt to deflate the missing mole and Little Man arguments. Grant Fredericks of Spokane, Washington–based Forensic Video Solutions played the video in slow-motion, concentrating on seventeen frames where the man turned his back, clearly displaying a dark spot. He compared the video with the CPD booking photos of a shirtless Kelly. “There’s something dark there on his back in that position,” he said, matching the video to photos of the mole to the left of Kelly’s spine, a few inches above the waist.

  Digitally altering the tape “would have been impossible,” Fredericks said, taking a professional forty-four years to change every frame. He also testified that the log-cabin playroom on George Street matched the one in the video, based on a comparison of knots in the wood. “It’s kind of like looking at the stars. You can then map them all out.”

  Questioning Fredericks on cross, Genson asked if the spot could be a glitch. “It comes and goes.” The lawyer showed the tape again at half-speed. “There; not there. There; not there.” Fredericks seemed amused, refuted that theory, and said the spot “tracks with him and moves with his body.” George Skaluba, a video expert with the FBI, confirmed that he also found no evidence that the tape had been altered or generated by a computer.

  The prosecution resumed on Tuesday, May 27, after Memorial Day. The state called Lindsey Perryman, a twenty-seven-year-old Chicago woman who worked as a personal assistant to Kelly for seven years, until 2006. She started by praising the star as a “great boss . . . I think so highly of Mr. Kelly and his family.” She paid little attention when she first heard the rumors of a tape with Kelly and Reshona, whom she met in 1999, introduced as the goddaughter of her boss and his wife, Andrea. Perryman said the singer often dispatched her to pick Reshona up after high school in Oak Park and drive her to one of his homes, on George Street or in Olympia Fields, or to Chicago Trax studio.

  Perryman said she never suspected anything untoward in the relationship. Reshona sometimes babysat Kelly’s children in Olympia Fields. Her father, Greg, played guitar and bass for the singer on tour and on his recordings, and he often came by the studio, where Reshona’s mother, Valerie, had an office and did paperwork for Kelly. Perryman didn’t even question when she saw Reshona bring a pillow and an overnight bag to the studio one night, because her parents and her younger brother accompanied her. “I had never seen him be inappropriate with anyone, and he had never been inappropriate with me. There’s never been any reason to walk away.”

  That changed when investigators showed Perryman the video. “I didn’t want to think it was them,” but she was “one hundred and ten-percent sure” she recognized Kelly and Reshona. “She has distinct cheekbones, and the way she moves her mouth, the way she smiles, it’s all very distinctive. The image I saw looked exactly like her, it sounded exactly like her. I was shocked. I was disturbed. I didn’t want to see any of this.” The former assistant added that she had seen another woman, Lisa Van Allen, visit Kelly in the studio, setting the stage for what many in the media called the prosecution’s “bombshell witness.”

  Judge Gaughan postponed Van Allen’s appearance several times during week two as the defense made a last-ditch attempt to exclude her testimony. The judge heard the back-and-forth between both sides out of the presence of the jury. Reporters and spectators were eager for the action to resume, and jurors sat waiting and watching TV, but not the news, they promised the judge. Finally, in a rare win for the prosecution, Gaughan ruled that the jury would hear from Van Allen on Monday, June 2, at the start of week three.

  The single mother of a five-year-old daughter, four months pregnant with her second child, twenty-seven-year-old Van Allen took the stand in a low-cut black dress. “I want to do what is right,” she said, starting by identifying the couple in the tape. Reshona looked “just exactly how I remember her—her body, her face, her breasts. Back then, I felt they were so much bigger than mine.” She identified Kelly by “everything from his face, to his bald head. His genitals, back, everything.” Then she began telling her own story, which started at age seventeen when she met Kelly while working as an extra in the video for “Home Alone,” a duet with rapper Keith Murray shot in 1997 near her home in Alpharetta, Georgia.

  Summoned to Kelly’s trailer by “his cousin, Blacky,” Van Allen said she and the star started talking, then they had sex. She was a year older than the age of consent in Georgia, sixteen. Kelly was “a nice guy,” and she was smitten by his charms and awed by his talent. Kelly asked Van Allen if her mother would mind if she came to Chicago, and Van Allen told him traveling wouldn’t be a problem. Several visits followed. The singer put her up at hotels in the Loop or at Trax studio because his wife, Andrea, was at home with their children. Kelly asked her to call him “Daddy.” Eventually, Van Allen quit her job in Atlanta, came to Chicago, and “just never left. I travele
d with him. We went to the mall, movies. I went on tour with him. He would pick me out of the audience at the shows, and I would do the bed scene at the end of every show.”

  Kelly introduced Van Allen to Reshona in late 1998. She said he told her Reshona was sixteen, though prosecutors contended she was thirteen or fourteen at the time. The three of them went to the log-cabin playroom on George Street, and the singer set up a video camera to record them having sex. Prosecutors granted Van Allen immunity for that testimony, since she committed a crime by having sexual contact with a minor. A year later, Van Allen, Kelly, and Reshona had another threesome on a futon in front of the Looney Tunes mural in the basketball court on George Street, Van Allen said. When she started crying, Kelly railed at her for ruining his video, and she cried again on the stand as she recalled that moment. “I didn’t want to do it. He got upset. He said he couldn’t watch that. He couldn’t do anything with me crying. He stopped the camera.”

  Van Allen appeared in the 2000 video for “I Wish,” braiding Kelly’s hair as he sat on the stoop of a house that looked like one of his childhood homes, in the area near West 107th Street and South Parnell Avenue. (The star’s half brother Carey told me the new owners wouldn’t allow filming at the actual house.) Van Allen had a third threesome with Kelly and Reshona in the trailer parked on set. Someone knocked on the door and interrupted, Van Allen said, and Kelly ordered Reshona to run “into the bathroom naked” to hide. The star did not record that encounter.

  In 2001, Van Allen moved back to Georgia, but she stayed in touch with Kelly. They spent a weekend shopping and having sex at the Swissôtel in Atlanta later that year, and “before I ended up leaving, I took a Rolex watch from him,” she said, confessing a $20,000 theft. She heard about the indictment in 2002, but didn’t call authorities. “I had just had my daughter. My mind was not on getting involved.”