Soulless

by Jim Derogatis

  Barry Weiss, Jive’s chief executive from 1991 to 2011, didn’t even admit that much. He claimed he knew nothing of Kelly’s behavior, even though the label he ran had been named as a party in several of the lawsuits filed by young girls against one of their biggest stars, dating all the way back to the first claim by Tiffany Hawkins in 1996. “I was a record company putting out R. Kelly’s records,” Weiss told Edgers. “That was all I knew. I wasn’t involved in his criminal cases. We were a record company, for God’s sakes.”

  “Robert destroys families, but everybody allowed Robert to do whatever he wanted to do, and he got lost in that,” Kelly’s friend and former tour manager Demetrius Smith told me—two decades ago. “He’s R. Kelly, he made it, and he believes he’s a god. When he made it, he turned into a monster. Barry Hankerson, Derrel McDavid, Jive Records—all of them could have helped Robert by not allowing him to have his way.” Of course, Smith could have helped, too. He did bring Tiffany Hawkins to a lawyer, and Tiffany stands as the first person who tried to stop Kelly. But talking to Edgers in 2018, Smith confessed that no one asked the ages of the girls in Kelly’s orbit, “because their mamas let them stay out all night.” He’s not wrong. Some of the parents of Kelly’s victims need to be added to the list of enablers, too.

  As testimony during Kelly’s 2008 trial made clear, Greg and Valerie Landfair knew about the relationship between the star and their teenage daughter Reshona. Aside from the video itself, which I will never be able to unsee, the image that haunts me comes from the sworn testimony at the trial by the singer’s personal assistant Lindsey Perryman, who saw Reshona, accompanied by her parents, bring a pillow and an overnight bag to the recording studio so she could spend the night.

  Greg, Valerie, and Reshona did not speak to me for this book, and they’ve refused to speak publicly to anyone since 2000. If Reshona’s parents were paid by Kelly, as many sources believe, the benefits were fleeting. Greg and Valerie Landfair have filed for bankruptcy three times, the first in August 2007, almost a year before the trial began. The court eventually discharged debts of nearly $450,000. The second time they filed for bankruptcy, the judge dismissed the filing because the required eight years between bankruptcy claims had not yet passed. The third time, in December 2016, the court provided debt relief of $100,000.

  I spoke to several parents of the girls who received cash settlements in exchange for signing nondisclosure agreements. None of them were perfect—show me a parent who is—but none had reason to suspect their daughter would be seduced by a wealthy celebrity whose music she loved after meeting him in, say, Lena McLin’s choir class, or at a radio station’s “Expo for Today’s Black Woman,” at Evergreen Plaza or Aventura Mall, or at the Rock ’N’ Roll McDonald’s after her prom. Many of these girls had never had a real romantic relationship. Some had never had sex. They were young, not just in age, but in maturity. They didn’t have the experience to suspect Kelly’s professions of love as a tool of a predator—one who I believe will come to stand as the worst in the history of popular music, which, given the art form’s often despicable history, is a particularly sickening distinction.

  Kelly became expert at separating young girls from their parents, families, and friends, sources say, especially if they were from underprivileged neighborhoods. “He’s really good with people who don’t have material things,” the former associate told me—again, two decades ago. “If you ever read about a pedophile, their whole life revolves around how to gain confidence for their sexual desires. Robert geared his whole life and career around this. He was attacking families.”

  Jerhonda Pace, née Johnson, heard the accusations against her musical idol, and she saw the video many times in Courtroom 500, but she wanted to believe Kelly was innocent, and the jury’s verdict gave her permission to do that. She also compared Kelly to Charles Manson, and while that charismatic power may be difficult for some to understand, it cannot be denied. It worked even on mature women such as Asante McGee and Kitti Jones. Plus, there was the music—always the music. “Robert will sit in front of that piano,” Demetrius Smith had said, and “make women melt.”

  Having spent many hours interviewing the Clarys and the Savages, I understand how they could say they knew but didn’t know, and how they thought things would be different for their daughters. They wanted to believe Kelly would make their daughter a star like Aaliyah, and the doting stage parents thought nothing would happen if they stayed by their girl’s side. “I knew the history,” J. Savage said, but “it didn’t really hit home.” Added Alice Clary, “He was never found guilty, he was acquitted.”

  Obviously, the legal system failed, and so did law enforcement, for almost seventeen years after the Youth Division of the Special Investigations Unit at CPD and the Polk County, Florida, Sheriff’s Office arrested Kelly in 2002. Since none of the original charges stuck for making child pornography, maybe the police and prosecutors who followed just didn’t want the trouble. Or maybe they thought anyone that rich or famous would just get off again. It had happened with his acquittal in 2008, and it had taken a big toll on everyone in law enforcement who worked on that case. It took years for me to convince some of them to talk about it again.

  I can’t discount journalism’s epic failure. Yes, it also took years for the media to expose Bill Cosby and Harvey Weinstein, not to mention Woody Allen, Kevin Spacey, Les Moonves, James Levine, Brett Ratner, Louis C.K., Bryan Singer, Jeffrey Epstein—hell, the list is seemingly endless—but once the first reporters did, the floodgates opened. Almost two decades passed before other journalists began to follow a fat music critic and an impish legal affairs reporter who started digging in public files and ringing doorbells, and a tireless columnist, Mary Mitchell, who wouldn’t stop shouting that her community needed to recognize the predator in its midst.

  Because my first love is music criticism, I’m especially disappointed with my peers in that benighted field. In an essay she wrote when accepting the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism in 2014, Philadelphia Inquirer architecture critic Inga Saffron maintained that her early days as a reporter in New Jersey “covering small-town zoning battles and urban renewal fiascos” were “fundamental to my development as a critic. . . . I jokingly began thinking of myself as an investigative critic.”

  I love the idea of investigative criticism, and I don’t think it’s a joke. We need it more than ever when assessing any art in the wake of Black Lives Matter, #MeToo, and the Trumpian assault on decency, democracy, and truth, at least if you believe as I do that everyone should be a critic. Why? Because art matters, damn it! It changes the world because it changes us. We all need to be investigative critics, to think about whether the art we embrace lives up to the ideals by which we live, and to call it out when it doesn’t. Or so says the fifty-four-year-old white cis male music critic and professor who, like young Jenny in my favorite Velvet Underground song, still believes in a life saved by rock ’n’ roll.

  In the program for a 1968 exhibition of his work in Stockholm, Andy Warhol presciently predicted everyone would have their fifteen minutes of fame, which presumes everyone wants it. Maybe he’s right. In the months after my first BuzzFeed News stories, some of my sources, including a few who’d initially been reluctant to talk on the record for months or years, embraced the spotlight, appearing in Surviving R. Kelly and other documentaries, on radio, and on television talk shows such as The View, Megyn Kelly TODAY, and The Dr. Oz Show. Some started websites, posted YouTube videos, opened Twitter and Instagram accounts, and made Facebook Public Figure pages. A few hired celebrity lawyers and publicists to field interview requests.

  The singer’s second wife, Andrea, has yet to publish the book she promised in 2012, Under the Red Carpet, but she did make a “video memoir” that she posted online as a pay-per-view, and she screens it before speaking engagements. Kitti Jones self-published a book, I Was Somebody Before This, and she sold the film rights. Jerhonda Pace née Johnson wrote and published A Life Beyond Abuse, and she’s working on a
sequel. Lisa Van Allen wrote Surviving the Pied Piper: The Untold Story, and Amazon is selling No Longer Trapped in the Closet: The Asante McGee Story. You can also add Sex Me: Confessions of Daddy’s Little Freak to your cart. That anonymous tome reads as such tawdry porn that I initially thought it was sick “fan fiction,” but one of my sources claims to have spoken to its author, who swears she lived with the cult for a time.

  It must feel liberating for these women, after years of keeping their stories and their hurt bottled up, to finally have the support of a sympathetic audience. It took extraordinary courage for them to speak out, and I’m sure it’s emboldening to feel that our culture has reached a tipping point. Bravo to them. I am not shaming or judging anyone who’s finding some mix of recompense and catharsis after being hurt by Kelly, and these stories needed to be told. Sadly, some of the women who summoned the courage to tell them have suffered. Lizzette Martinez lost her corporate job at a national restaurant chain after my story first published her name in May 2018. She appeared in—but did not watch—Surviving R. Kelly. “I need a break from all of this. This is a big mess in my eyes,” she said. “I’m struggling bad. I lost my job at Benihana months ago, and things are not so good, but I’m trying to stay upbeat.”

  The thought of Lizzette still struggling after all these years saddens me, and so does the way some of the people in this story have turned on one another, after first being brought together by that intrepid amateur detective, J. Savage. Some resent the Savages’ tendency to spread any scrap of information far and wide. Some are pursuing additional lawsuits against Kelly. Faith Rodgers, a Dallas woman in her early twenties who claims Kelly gave her herpes, was initially represented by renowned civil rights attorney S. Lee Merritt, but in early 2019, she, her mother, and Dominique Gardner’s mother, Michelle Kramer, appeared at a press conference with celebrity lawyer Gloria Allred. The Clarys preferred to work quietly behind the scenes, until they announced that another celebrity attorney, Michael Avenatti, was representing them in early 2019. All of them hope the civil and criminal courts will finally give them some measure of justice, and the Clarys and the Savages are still desperate to bring their daughters home.

  As of this writing, Joy Savage and Azriel Clary have not spoken to their parents in person for, respectively, two and a half and four years. What is life like for Tim’s daughter Joy, now twenty-three, and Azriel Clary, now twenty-one? I can only imagine, but I did glean some understanding from one woman who spent several years with the cult, and whom I came to know in some small way.

  Dominique Gardner first emailed me on July 6, 2018, a few weeks after she left R. Kelly, writing with all caps in the subject line, “PRIVACY IS EVERYTHING!” We met in person, then traded texts, emails, and phone calls for nine months before meeting again on March 7, 2019. She’d decided it was time to speak publicly, to “give my truth.” She was twenty-seven, and she had been one of Kelly’s lovers for nine years.

  Dominique and Kelly first became intimate when she was seventeen, the age of consent in Illinois, starting in 2009, not long after her friend Jerhonda passed along the singer’s phone number. In 2015, she became one of six women living with the singer. The others included Joy Savage and Azriel Clary, and Dominique said she was especially close to the girl she called “Az.” The most dramatic scenes in Surviving R. Kelly showed Dominique’s mother, Michelle Kramer, tracking her down to a Los Angeles hotel room and convincing her to leave the “cult.” Dominique rejected that word, as well as the word “brainwashing,” and she told me she hadn’t watched the documentary.

  “What’s the point of seeing it when I lived it? People are using it as entertainment, when it wasn’t entertainment for me, you know?”

  After graduating from Hillcrest High School in Chicago’s Southwest suburbs in 2009, Dominque began studying to become a dental hygienist, per her mother’s wishes. She wanted to be a poet and a writer. “I only went because my mother gave me an ultimatum: ‘You either stay with me and go to school, or get kicked out.’” She was close to her family, and even though they didn’t approve of her dating an older man, she saw Kelly often for several years while still living at home. The sexual relationship began after she watched him play basketball at a West Side gym. “I was never starstruck with him, because I didn’t see the R. Kelly side, I saw the Robert side. I was never with him for the fame, for his money.” Why had she wanted to meet him? I asked. “I was in love with him before I even met him, and when I met him, it was like, wow.”

  Dominique frequently visited the mansion in Olympia Fields. After Kelly rented his getaway properties in the Atlanta suburb of Johns Creek, she began living with him there, as well as at Trump Tower Chicago and the recording studio on North Justine Street. “Atlanta is where he changed. It was like something switched,” she said. Before that, “I used to go home on a regular basis. I was able to call my family. Then, all of a sudden, it was ‘no.’”

  We first met in July 2018 at a bar she chose in Rogers Park on the North Side, a cozy pub with dark wood tables, uncomfortable stools, lame alternative rock blaring on the sound system, and a dozen craft beers on tap. Dominique was startlingly underweight, and she spoke haltingly while looking out the big plate-glass windows, watching for any black SUV that might stop and linger. “I wouldn’t put it past him to have his guys following me,” she said.

  When the two of us met again to talk for my recorder, at a different bar in the same neighborhood nine months later, she looked much healthier, spoke more freely, and laughed more. She no longer worriedly scanned the street outside the windows. We started by chatting about music—we both agreed Kendrick Lamar is brilliant—and our tattoos. She admired that I’m “all tatted up.” Only one of her tattoos, a lion’s head on the back of her right hand, could readily be seen, protruding from the sleeve of her hoodie. I asked if she had others, and she said she does, two images of Kelly’s face, one on her left leg and another on her rib cage—a particularly painful place to get a tattoo, she noted, especially when you’re as thin as she is. I agreed it helps to have plenty of flesh in the areas you get inked, and she laughed.

  Two weeks before our second meeting, on February 22, 2019, the state of Illinois had indicted R. Kelly for the second time, on ten counts of criminal sexual abuse involving four victims, three of them minors. One was Dominique’s friend Jerhonda, and prosecutors said they confirmed the presence of Kelly’s DNA on a T-shirt she gave police. Kelly’s latest attorney, Steve Greenberg, maintained his client’s innocence. “He’s a rock star. He doesn’t have to have nonconsensual sex.” The star spent that night and the next two in Cook County Jail before a woman identified in court papers as “a friend” posted his $100,000 bond, a dramatic contrast to when he paid seven hundred and fifty hundred-dollar bills for his bail in 2002. Greenberg said his client had serious financial problems. “I’m a broke-ass legend,” the star himself sang in “I Admit.”

  Two nights before Dominique and I met that second time, on Tuesday, March 5, Gayle King sat with Kelly for an eighty-minute interview at Trump Tower. The interview aired over the next three days on CBS This Morning, as well as in a primetime special Friday night. King also interviewed Joy and Azriel. They defended the man they said they loved and insisted they were living where they chose to live, but they also appeared scripted and defensive on camera. King later described how Kelly hovered in the background and coughed loudly at times, as if to remind the two women he was within earshot.

  During his interview, Kelly became histrionic, crying, standing up, and directly addressing the cameras. It prompted an avalanche of Internet memes and a cold-open skit on Saturday Night Live. He maintained he was innocent of all the charges and accusations, and he branded all the women speaking out against him as liars. “I don’t even know what a cult is. But I know I don’t have one,” Kelly told King. “I’m not Lucifer. I’m a man. I make mistakes, but I’m not a devil. And by no means am I a monster.”

  Dominique did not see all of the interview—she was avo
iding most media, she said—but she saw that snippet. “That’s not genuine. That’s the devil talking. Talking about ‘I’m not Lucifer.’ Yes, you are.” Yet she was clearly conflicted about the man she said she still loved. “He is a giver, because when everything between me and him was good—oh, my God, it was, like, perfect. But, as soon as he gets mad, he turns into a person like, oh, what up, the new Rob.”

  The desire to convey her complex feelings about Kelly is what prompted Dominique to start talking to me. People don’t really understand, she insisted, at least not the way she does. Every time we talked, I asked her if she was in therapy. She was initially reluctant, but when we finally spoke on the record, she’d had her first session with a counselor just a few days earlier. “At the end of the day, I am not playing victim. I done did some shit,” she said, including sleeping with two other men in Kelly’s inner circle while she was one of his girlfriends. “Maybe he did hurt. Maybe he was in love with me. But I never gave him a fair chance.”

  I asked if she regretted spending a third of her life with Kelly. She didn’t. “I loved him to death, you know what I’m sayin’? But he needs help. Who doesn’t need help?” She struggled to find a way to describe the situation, since she didn’t like the words people used. “I wouldn’t even say ‘mind games.’ It was just the fact that he tried to break me. I couldn’t be broken. He wanted that control over me, and I wouldn’t give him that power. So, he figured, like, If I don’t give her food, she’ll come around. Nope. I’d rather die than come around and give you my soul.”

  Dominique had heard about other women saying they had to follow Kelly’s “rules,” but she didn’t use that term, either, and she said some of what the singer’s accusers have said was wrong. For example, she was allowed to watch television and connect to the Internet. There were “no locks on no doors . . . If them two other girls, Joy and Azriel, wanna walk out, they can do that.” However, she said Kelly did take away his girlfriends’ phones, replacing them with new ones to be used only with him; he did not allow them to contact their parents, family members, or friends; he decreed that they should all wear baggy gym clothes, so other men could not admire their bodies; he did not want them to look at or speak to other men, and they had to ask for his permission to eat or go to the bathroom.