“You can’t have my heart and you won’t use my mind / But do what you want with my body,” Gaga sang when she performed the duet with Kelly on Saturday Night Live and at the American Music Awards. For the latter, he portrayed President Clinton pursuing her Monica Lewinsky in the oval office. In her own video for the song, Gaga appeared on an examination table while Kelly played doctor, then she posed nude for fashion photographer Terry Richardson, who directed the clip and appeared in it as himself. Shortly after its release, Gaga pulled the video, because Richardson too had been accused of sexual harassment and an obsession with underage girls. Many in the music industry found it hard to believe that the whip-smart diva, a sexual assault survivor herself and a supporter of female and gay empowerment, did not know Kelly’s history. Was she just pushing transgressive buttons like her role model Madonna? Did she just not care? I got no response to several requests for comment to her management.
“I have always been an R. Kelly fan and actually it is like an epic pastime in the Haus of Gaga that we just get fucked-up and play R. Kelly,” Lady Gaga told MTV News circa the single’s release. She added that she thought, “‘This is a real R&B song and I have to call the king of R&B. I need his blessing.’ It was a mutual love. He’s a very, very, very talented man. I’m so excited to be on this album with him.”
R. Kelly’s big year ended with one more triumph. More than any album since Chocolate Factory, critics enthusiastically embraced Black Panties, released in December 2013. On the cover, he appeared in a bandit mask while a woman naked except for the aforementioned undies sat on his lap. He bowed her like a cello. Jezebel, the ostensibly feminist Gawker sister site, hailed the disc as “a magnificent ode to pussy.” Wrote critic Isha Aran, “Be prepared to be bombarded with some super-sexy R. Kelly sex. Like, more than usual. There’s ‘Crazy Sex,’ there’s sex in ‘Every Position,’ there’s some ‘Physical’ sex, there’s sex with the ‘Lights On’ . . . [and there’s] a marriage proposal to a pussy.”
“Kelly allows himself to be more human than the rest of us,” Jordan Sargent wrote in Pitchfork. “It is not ridiculous that he wants to marry a pussy—that level of carnality exists somewhere in all of us, male or female. His brilliance is in routinely bringing out into the open the things that—with good reason!—stay in the darkest corners of our minds. In disrupting the social order, maybe his music helps preserve it as well.”
Behind the scenes, Kelly faced some disruption of his own. The first blot on his big year came with an acrimonious split from manager Derrel McDavid, who had quietly steered the singer’s career since Barry Hankerson left in 2000. McDavid “knew where the bodies were and he had the keys to the vault,” said Cheryl Mack, one of the singer’s former personal assistants. “I mean, he really had video. He had paperwork. He just had a baby, though, and he was done.”
McDavid had partnered with many other music-biz heavyweights to drive Kelly’s continued success, including Jonathan Azu of Red Light during the year of indie outreach, but the star always hated to share credit or profits. Before Azu, Kelly and McDavid worked with tough-talking Jeff Kwatinetz of the high-powered West Coast management company the Firm, whose other clients included the Backstreet Boys, Jennifer Lopez, Kelly Clarkson, and Snoop Dogg. In 2011, Kwatinetz sued Kelly for $1 million, claiming he’d been stiffed on his 15 percent commission “because the monies were needed for payments to avoid lawsuits and adverse publicity resulting from Kelly’s alleged [sexual misconduct],” according to TMZ. Kelly ended that lawsuit, like so many others, with an out-of-court settlement.
The business relationship and friendship between Kelly and McDavid dated to the Public Announcement days. McDavid had also gone to Kenwood Academy, and although he was only six years older than Kelly, he looked at the singer “like a son.” He didn’t like his name appearing in the news. “During the trial, [McDavid] was a fixture in the courtroom,” Edward McClelland wrote in Blender. “At the time, no one could figure out what he did. Asked his function, McDavid said, ‘I don’t exist.’” But for years, McDavid was there, just a step behind Kelly, at court or on the red carpet.
Six months after their split, McDavid sued Kelly for missing the $40,000 monthly payments on the $1.3 million settlement that ended their partnership, according to a story by Michelle Manchir in the Chicago Tribune. “McDavid has suffered significant harm as a proximate result of Kelly’s breach of the settlement agreement, and is entitled to recover from Kelly the full amount owed,” the lawsuit claimed in August 2014. I wrote about it for my blog at WBEZ.org, noting that the then-fifty-three-year-old manager had stood by Kelly as his staunchest defender through the singer’s darkest days. McDavid read and seemed to appreciate that, and he wrote me via Facebook Messenger. “It’s been a long time. You got it right this time. Thanks.” I responded that I always tried to get it right, and McDavid replied, “You still covered by whatever amendment? Talk tomorrow, maybe we can meet.”
We never met. I believe McDavid, inspired as ever by gangster movies, shared that exchange with the Kelly camp and used it as leverage to get his money, something along the lines of, pay up, or I’ll talk to that fat fuck DeRogatis. Shortly thereafter, Kelly settled the lawsuit with McDavid. The terms and amount were not disclosed.
Before Kelly headlined Pitchfork in 2013, a booking that made McDavid especially proud, I worked with colleagues at WBEZ to post an exhaustive timeline of the singer’s story from the beginning. I tried to grapple as a critic (and now a professor) with the big questions posed by Kelly’s continued success. Can the ideal of separating the art from the artist apply to him, given the long list of disturbing accusations? And should it?
In a six-part video series called “The Kelly Conversations,” I talked with fellow critics, academics, mental-health professionals, activists, and fans to wrestle with the issue. Take the most extreme examples you care to name: a clown-face painting by John Wayne Gacy, or the album Charles Manson recorded. I can’t condemn you if you find beauty or pleasure in either in a vacuum, but if you know the context, and you embrace those works because of that context, well, you’re a sick fuck and I want nothing to do with you.
Things get a lot more complicated with, say, Pablo Picasso, Woody Allen, or Bill Cosby. Like many Chicagoans, I’m proud of the sculpture in Daley Plaza; I know Picasso’s history with women, but I do not see it reflected in that work of art. As a history geek, a Francophile, and a fan of Ernest Hemingway and Salvador Dalí, I love Midnight in Paris, but I can never watch Manhattan again in the wake of abuse accusations by Allen’s daughter Dylan Farrow, seeing as how the movie depicts a forty-two-year-old comedy writer dating a seventeen-year-old girl. Fat Albert was a favorite childhood cartoon, and I still relate to the title character, but The Cosby Show now seems like a hypocritical lie, the perfect family it portrays serving as a jarring contrast to the star’s decades-long pattern of sexual predation. And the music of R. Kelly? Well, you have your answer, and I have mine.
That’s where we all wound up at the end of “The Kelly Conversations.” It had been a game attempt, perhaps, but I think it ultimately failed to grasp at least one element of Kelly’s appeal. Consciously or not, some people love him and his music because of, not despite his predatory behavior. After my series ran, my friend Mikki Kendall wrote a series of tweets (she’s @ Karnythia) hashtagged “mandingo.”
“Mandingo is the myth that black people are hypersexual,” Kendall further schooled me via DM. “Mandingo warrior = black men who are always ready to have sex. Black women are unrapeable . . . because of the trope that we always want sex.” It’s all, Kendall wrote, “a huge fetish subculture.” Bigger, even, than urination.
Some of the concertgoers bounce-bounce-bouncing to “Ignition (Remix)” at Coachella, Bonnaroo, and Pitchfork in 2013 wore diapers when “I Believe I Can Fly” powered Space Jam. Most weren’t even born yet. The only context many had for Kelly’s behavior came from Dave Chappelle in reruns on Comedy Central, or maybe a then-current bit by comedian Aziz Ansa
ri. After introducing Kelly as “a brilliant R&B singer/crazy person,” Ansari went on to portray a sexual Superfreak with an unquenchable libido, yet again masking a pattern predation by making us laugh. Yet if concertgoers in 2013 could claim ignorance or a lack of understanding, the promoters who booked Kelly couldn’t, and those at Pitchfork bothered me most.
I’d had an at-times contentious relationship with the brain trust behind one of the most dominant voices in music criticism since the heyday of Rolling Stone. Pitchfork founder Ryan Schreiber and his business partner Chris Kaskie stopped talking to me after I made one too many swipes at their lack of consciousness and ethics. I gathered they were genuine, unquestioning fans of Kelly’s music, thrilled to host him under their umbrella, and blithely unconcerned about his predatory behavior. Festival booker Mike Reed, a well-respected drummer on Chicago’s avant-jazz scene, did the hard work of actually staging the festival, with help from volunteers in the local underground music community. Those included many of my close friends, among them former intern Anders Lindall, with whom I saw the Best of Both Worlds concert. Some had problems with Schreiber, Kaskie, and Reed “co-signing” Kelly, as the hipsters say, but Pitchfork booked him anyway.
I reviewed the 2013 Pitchfork Music Festival for my blog as usual, and I had transcendent experiences that weekend with two of my all-time favorite bands, veteran art-punks Wire and the female quartet Savages, both among the many tattooed on my arms. Then Kelly capped the weekend on Sunday night. The set found the singer Rated PG-13, with no sign of the giant bed or threesome in a cell. The Pied Piper played all or part of thirty hits, and the crowd reveled in bumping and grinding to “Sex in the Kitchen,” “Flirt,” and “Ignition (Remix).” For the big finale, Kelly sang “I Believe I Can Fly” and released hundreds of white dove-shaped balloons into the night sky. Then he left the stage as “Trapped in the Closet” provided a taped soundtrack for fans to file out and head home.
Irony fueled the appreciation of Kelly by some of the paying customers at Pitchfork, I concluded. The merch for sale onsite testified to that, including five-dollar bumper stickers with the singer’s face and the slogans, “After Sex, I Beat My Chest Like I’m King Kong” and “Do You Mind if I Strip for You?” The very mundanity of Kelly’s performance led to my second, sadder conclusion, that Schreiber, Kaskie, and who knows how many others in that dusty baseball field just didn’t think what happened onstage mattered in the “real world.” It was all just entertainment product to consume. It’s just music.
As often happened, I caught shit for being moralistic, out of touch, and too fat and old to enjoy music in the summer heat anyway. Typical was a snide piece in Vice’s Noisey. “DeRogatis’s assessment . . . indicated a fundamental disconnect between the way he perceives music and the way we consume it today,” Drew Millard wrote. “Music fans listen to R. Kelly with the same genuine enjoyment they listen to Wire. . . . Pitchfork booking R. Kelly had more to do with iconography than irony, and that’s a good thing. . . . R. Kelly’s life’s work is to bring joy to people.”
I said it then, and I’ll say it again now. Fuck him. I could take pride in the derision of anyone connected to misogynistic bro-central Vice, but some tweets by fellow Chicago critic, former fanzine editor, and ardent feminist Jessica Hopper got under even my elephantine skin. Hopper and I had our critical spats over the years, but no serious music fan should respect any critic with whom they don’t occasionally disagree. I welcomed any conversation about why Kelly’s history shouldn’t impede us from enjoying his bedroom jams. We began an email dialog that led to a lengthy in-person interview that she posted on the Village Voice website in late December 2013. According to editor Brian McManus, it became the most-clicked piece the vaunted alt-weekly ever published online, and the quote Jessica noted at the end of her introduction went viral. It was just me using my megaphone (one I’m privileged to have) to amplify what many black girls told me for years.
“I was one of those people who challenged DeRogatis and was even flip about his judgment, something I quickly came to regret,” Hopper wrote. “DeRogatis and I have tangled—even feuded on air—over the years; yet amid the Twitter barbs, he approached me offline and told me about how one of Kelly’s victims called him in the middle of the night after his Pitchfork review came out, to thank him for caring when no one else did. He told me of mothers crying on his shoulder, seeing the scars of a suicide attempt on a girl’s wrists, the fear in their eyes. He detailed an aftermath that the public has never had to bear witness to. DeRogatis offered to give me access to every file and transcript he has collected in reporting this story—as he has to other reporters and journalists, none of whom has ever looked into the matter, thus relegating it to one man’s personal crusade. I thought that last fact merited a public conversation about why. . . . [H]e says, ultimately, ‘The saddest fact I’ve learned is nobody matters less to our society than young black women. Nobody.’”
Almost three years later, a mother in Georgia read that quote when someone tweeted it. The tweet led to Jessica’s interview, which led the mother to Google my name. She read every other word I’d reported on R. Kelly that she could find online. Then she emailed me.
CHAPTER 14
THE CULT
By 2015, R. Kelly spent only half his time in the city he called “the center of my universe.” When he was in his hometown, he could often be found in the latest Chocolate Factory—after his hit album, he called every studio where he worked “the Chocolate Factory”—in a rented warehouse on North Justine Street. It stood a block away from the West Side’s Union Park, site of the annual Pitchfork Music Festival. I have always been struck by how Kelly returns to the same handful of key places in his life again and again—the house at 107th and Parnell, the former YMCA building in the South Loop, the Rock ’N’ Roll McDonald’s. Now, he also rented an apartment in Trump Tower Chicago, which rose on North Wabash Avenue at the river in 2005, after the Trump Organization bought and demolished the old, ugly but lovable Sun-Times headquarters. He lived part-time at the location where I’d gotten the fax, started my reporting with Abdon Palasch, and watched the Reshona Landfair videotape with Sparkle. Did he know that?
Like a lot of aging, wealthy Chicago snowbirds, Kelly now wintered in the south. He rented a luxurious seven-bedroom French-style mansion on Old Homestead Trail in Johns Creek, a suburb thirty miles northeast of Atlanta. He also leased a four-bedroom, four-bath single-family home two miles away on Creek Wind Court. Cheryl Mack, the latest in a long and constantly revolving line of personal assistants, began working for Kelly in mid-2013, and she found both of his Georgia rental properties. She and many others told me he called the smaller home the “guest house.” Mack was one of several sources Jonjelyn Savage, who goes by J., led me to when we began talking after she first emailed me.
“Hi, I am a mom of a young adult daughter who is caught up as a victim by Mr. Kelly,” J. wrote on the morning of November 2, 2016. Her email arrived as I worked at home, grading papers for my Reviewing the Arts class at Columbia College Chicago. “I spoke with another parent recently, who I believe has or will be contacting you soon from Florida. I reside in Atlanta. If you can give me a contact # and a time to reach you later this evening, my husband & I will call u together with more information. This is not easy for us and we are not looking for any exposure or seeking money. I never thought my daughter would end up dealing with someone like this. He is still up to his same tactics, he just makes sure they are over 17 or 18. Kind Regards, J.”
Unlike the fax, I didn’t sleep on the email, and my first long conversation with J. and her husband, Tim Savage, a few hours later led to many more.
According to the Savages, the first of fourteen sources who told me the same story, six women who slept with Kelly in Georgia moved between the guest house and the Johns Creek mansion. The star denied the women, all legal age, any contact with friends and family, my sources said. He controlled every aspect of their lives, dictating what they ate, how they dressed
, when they bathed, when they slept, and how they pleasured him in sexual encounters that he recorded. Kelly punished the women physically and mentally, my sources added, if they broke “his rules.”
The first journalistic colleague I approached after my earliest conversations with the Savages looked at me quizzically. She didn’t see a story. Tim and J.’s eldest daughter, Joycelyn (who goes by Joy) was twenty-one, over the age of consent in both Georgia and Illinois. Pop-star kinks and polyamorous behavior weren’t new and weren’t news, and people chose to live in a lot of alternative or nonconventional arrangements. “Have you heard of Fifty Shades of Grey?” my colleague asked.
I thought this was different. Perhaps because I knew Kelly, at least through years of reporting and hundreds of interviews with people who’d worked with, closely observed, and been hurt by him. I spent the next nine months reporting a story that made the case that these women might be in peril. Five news organizations passed on it before BuzzFeed News, the news organization that broke the Trump dossier, finally published it in July 2017.
Tim and J. Savage started dating in junior year of high school in Memphis, and they fell in love over burgers at a restaurant where R. Kelly’s music played in the background. They went to different colleges but married before heading off to school, and on one of their weekends together, J. got pregnant with their first daughter, Joy. In time, Joy had two younger sisters, Jailynn (called Jai) and little Jori. The oldest girls sang in church. After Joy and Jai impressed the judges of an American Idol–like talent contest at a local shopping mall, they made it to the next round in California. The Savages scraped together a thousand dollars in entry fees and drove the whole family thirty-four hours west. “They wanted us to move there,” Tim said. Instead, the dedicated but cash-strapped stage parents relocated to Atlanta, hoping to forward their girls’ careers in the vibrant music scene there. The city music fans call “Hotlanta” had a lower cost of living, Tim said, and extended family lived nearby.
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