“I couldn’t even have a drink without his permission. I’m a grown-ass woman, and I’ve gotta ask you if I want a drink? Everything you do, you have to ask him. That’s not living, that’s not normal. I’ve got to ask to use the fucking bathroom? Are you serious? I’m about to pee on myself if I can’t get in contact with you. What the fuck is this?”
Dominique said she was the “tomboy” among Kelly’s live-in lovers, and the most rebellious. She often disobeyed him, and she suffered what she called “consequences,” including spankings, slapping, beatings, and being hit with an extension cord. Once, after she threw a piece of a Keurig coffeemaker at Kelly, “he grabbed me and he pulled my hair out, and I had, like, patches torn from my hair.” That’s when she decided to cut her hair super-short, she added.
The “consequences” came when Kelly felt as if “we disrespected him or disobeyed him. It’s like a parent when your children go against your word. When your children go against your word—‘No, you can’t go to that party’—I’m gonna sneak out the window anyway. You get caught, what you parents gonna do? They gonna punish you, right? But we’re grown women. You can’t do that. ’Cause now, it’s like, that’s abuse, sorry to say.”
Still, Dominique said, “I’m not gonna sit here and act like I’m innocent . . . one time, I did hit him back. He’s like, ‘Are you crazy that you just hit me?’ Like, yeah! Me and him had like an Ike and Tina moment, like they had in the limousine . . . I wasn’t afraid of him.”
After being reunited with her mother in May 2018, in the scenes captured in Surviving R. Kelly, Dominique returned to Kelly’s side three days later. She stayed with him for about two more weeks, until she finally walked away for good. She did not do it face-to-face; that would have been too hard, she said. “He went to sleep, and I just wrote him a letter: ‘You are a great man. No hard feelings, I am just over it. I am growing. This is not working.’ And I left, and I never looked back.”
When we met, Dominique was living with her mother again, working and saving money until she could afford a studio apartment of her own. “I would probably still be there if he would have let me go to my little brother’s graduation. I’d still be there, but, when he told me no . . . I’m, like, ‘What is wrong with you?’ You don’t let people see their families, I guess, because we might realize how much freedom and happiness we have out there with our families. . . . When you go home and actually see your family, you’re like, damn, I am actually missing out on a lot.”
Every time we talked, I asked Dominique why she stayed with Kelly for so long, and what she believes is the source of his hold over the women who live with him. Finally, she called up an image of the star on her new cell phone—his most recent mug shot. “It’s, like, I know them eyes. Every time I looked in his eyes, I knew he was sorry. Like, when he hit us, hit me, he was, like, he apologized. Like, he said, ‘I done did some things, and I apologize for it.’ I’m, like, you did, you did! But enough was enough. Yes, you did say, ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry.’ Okay. But, then again, you do it again when shit don’t go your way.”
Kelly often discussed the sexual abuse he claims he suffered, as well as his difficulties reading and writing. “At the end of the day, he’s a victim, too, because he went through some shit, and people—they don’t understand.” Dominique had been contacted by both state and federal investigators, but at that point, she had avoided talking to them. “I’m just, whatever. I’m not talking to you guys.” She was stung by criticism from some, including the Savages and the Clarys, that she should have spoken out against Kelly sooner, and that she should be talking to the authorities. “I just want to heal. I just want my privacy,” she said. “People may disagree or hate me for what I’m saying. That’s the reason why I never wanted to come out. Because I’m not trying to defend him and what he has done, but, at the end of the day, you don’t understand what he’s been through, as a child.”
Many police officers have told me it’s not uncommon for them to respond to a domestic-violence call and find one partner, battered and bleeding, standing beside the other, insisting the call had been a mistake, that it was all just a big misunderstanding, and they really love each other. Psychologists use the term “cognitive dissonance.” Once again, I sought the perspective of Dr. Charmaine Jake-Matthews, who has spent much of her life counseling victims of sexual and domestic abuse in Chicago, since the years when she sang beside Kelly in the Kenwood Academy choir. “Simply put, this is the psychological tension that is caused when there is a mismatch between your actions and/or situation and your beliefs and thoughts. When such a mismatch occurs, the person seeks (even if at an unconscious level) to relieve it. . . . The victim is often unable to change the situation. Thus they must change the way they think about the situation to alleviate the dissonance,” the good doctor wrote me. “If you trusted someone, got into a relationship with them, and then realized that the relationship was not good for you, you would leave. However, if that person has all of the power and control in the situation, you cannot simply leave. The only way to alleviate cognitive dissonance is to convince yourself that this person is good to you and that you want to be in the situation. Of course, most victims do not do this consciously, but it occurs nonetheless.”
When Dominique and I met in February 2019, Kelly was in Cook County Jail for the second time in two weeks, this time for failure to pay $161,000 in back child-support payments. He spent another three nights in a segregated cell, away from the general population, before another anonymous patron paid the court and he was released. Dominique felt sorry for him and thought it was unfair that he was being deprived of his livelihood and his lifeline—his music. “I feel like he should be on house arrest in a studio, because, like I said, his music makes him get through the situations, what’s he going through. Jail time, no. He needs to have a twenty-four-hour therapist at his house.”
She added, however, that Kelly at long last needs to be honest about his behavior. She leaned down and spoke directly into my recorder, as if talking to the man she said she still loves. “You can stop the cycle,” she said. “Just be honest. People don’t want you in jail.”
As an atheist who rejected religion during freshman year at Hudson Catholic Regional School for Boys, I may be underplaying the role of faith in R. Kelly’s story. The struggle by some to square his inspiring spiritual anthems with his hot ’n’ horny bedroom jams is one I will never fully understand; I assume the former are a con and the latter are perhaps unwitting confessions of predatory behavior. The motivations of the singer’s pastors and spiritual advisors leave me baffled, but then so does the way the Catholic Church has covered up for predatory priests for so long.
The churches that proliferate on Chicago’s South and West Sides are centers of spirituality and community, but they are also political power bases, and few are bigger or more powerful than Salem Baptist Church in the South Side’s Pullman neighborhood. Founded by the Rev. James Meeks in 1985, Salem Baptist drew more than nine thousand congregants to its weekly services in 2008, the year Kelly finally went to trial. By then, Meeks had added politician to a résumé including preacher, pastor, and superstar spiritual advisor. “There is nothing on earth that God does not do,” the reverend told his flock, “but God has to have some people to do it through.”
Meeks served three terms in the Illinois Senate, representing the 15th District from 2003 to 2013. For two years, he caucused as a Democrat in the state capital of Springfield with Barack Obama at the end of his three terms representing the 13th District of Chicago’s Hyde Park. Meeks was always flexible in his politics, however. He is the rare Illinois Dem who’s proudly and stridently anti-gay, and in 2017, union-busting, hard-right Republican Gov. Bruce Rauner appointed him chairman of the State Board of Education.
Through the early 2000s, Meeks was often mentioned as the successor to the Rev. Jesse Jackson as leader of the Rainbow/PUSH Coalition, Chicago’s long-running and most powerful black activist group. Some criticized his then-pendin
g anointment, and it has yet to happen, since Jackson has yet to step down. In 2002, John B. Koss reported in the Times of Northwest Indiana that “Derrick Mosley, founder and president of the Brothers and Sisters in Coalition Bringing About Reform, maintained that Meeks, pastor of Salem Baptist Church of Chicago, is tainted with ‘controversy and poor discretion,’ and that putting him in charge of the organization is a mistake.” That was before Mosley was convicted of using a videotape of Kelly and gospel singer Deleon Richards to extort her husband, New York Yankees outfielder Gary Sheffield. “Mosley said he was particularly bothered by Meeks’s spiritual counseling of prominent people accused of sexual offenses, such as musician R. Kelly and former U.S. congressman Mel Reynolds, who was given the job of managing various church-related projects earlier this year.”
Whether it was because he became mindful of the optics, or because Kelly stopped donating to his causes, as Mary Mitchell and several of my sources suggested, Meeks began to distance himself from the singer even before the trial started. By 2008, the reverend had stopped appearing beside Kelly in television interviews, and he no longer brought a yellow bus full of grammar-school children wearing “Free R. Kelly” T-shirts to Twenty-Sixth and Cal. He refused to be interviewed for this book, as did Reverend Jackson, who had urged readers of the Sun-Times to “avoid a rush to judgement” the day of Kelly’s indictment, saying “there are other greater issues in the world.” Nevertheless, sources told me Chicago’s Baptist pastors and politicians topped the list of prominent members of the black community who urged State’s Attorney Dick Devine to dismiss the charges against Kelly with a plea deal that would have given him only probation.
“For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God”—Romans 3:23. “God will bring into judgment both the righteous and the wicked”—Ecclesiastes 3:17. There are some good lines in that Good Book, if you bother to read them.
People believe many things, and I will not judge them. Demetrius Smith, Kelly’s old friend and former road manager, had fallen on hard times when we reconnected in 2019, after talking many times in the early 2000s. Bitter, alienated from his children, and struggling to support himself, he relied on his own faith to sustain him after many villainized him for his comments in Surviving R. Kelly. In the series as in his book, The Man Behind the Man, Smith admits to securing the falsified marriage certificate for Kelly and Aaliyah, and some see him as one of Kelly’s most sinister enablers. “I never want to talk to that piece of shit again,” one of the show’s creators told me. He may be flawed, but nothing Smith ever told me proved untrue.
“Robert don’t know love,” Smith said when I asked, for this book, about Kelly’s relationship with his mother. Then he changed topics. “Did you read in my book where I talked about the demon?” I told him I’d read his book many times, and that passage always struck me. In 1996, Smith had split from Kelly, but the singer wanted him to come back, saying he desperately needed his old friend’s help after the settlement with Tiffany Hawkins. They went to the East Bank Club in the West Loop near the Chicago River, a 450,000-square-foot fitness club with thousands of members and hundreds of employees. After Kelly played basketball, he sat in the fancy gym’s restaurant at a table full of girls. Then the singer beckoned Smith into the men’s room.
Smith picked up the narrative from his book when we talked, repeating parts of the scene word for word. “That actually happened, you see. I went in the bathroom with Robert, man, and he said, ‘The spirit of the Lord is on me,’ and I started prayin’ and prayin’, and he started prayin’. We started talking in tongues, and then that beast came, and I heard that demon. I am talkin’ ’bout”—and here Smith lapsed into loud, angry, garbled noises like Mercedes McCambridge providing the voice of Linda Blair’s possessed teenager in The Exorcist.
“I got scared, man. We was in what should have been a crowded bathroom downtown, and nobody came in that bathroom for about forty minutes. We was just talkin’ the talk, and then that beast came up. He stepped back in the stall and that door closed, like somebody slammed it—bam!—and then . . .” And here he channeled the Exorcist voice again.
“Robert stepped out of that bathroom and he ain’t never been the same, man. It’s a beast in that boy, I am telling you, DeRo. This thing is spiritual. It’s a spiritual beast in that man, and he need to be set down with that beast, so he can battle with him. That beast, it’s a sex demon. It’s a sex demon! Robert was molested and he survived it. He survived his molestation, you see, and now they trying to put him in jail, DeRo. They can’t do that, man. That’s the root, DeRo. It’s a demon in that boy.”
Smith noticed my silence. What the hell do you say to that? “It ain’t real enough for you, huh?” he asked. I noted that Robert had had many chances for redemption. Hadn’t the first lawsuit filed by Tiffany Hawkins in 1996 been enough to make him stop, to convince him to get help?
“If a demon got you possessed,” Smith said, “you ain’t gonna listen to nobody. ’Cause you possessed, and it’s a strong demon. You know, Robert know God, but he got a strong demon on him. Anytime he can walk away from Ms. McLin and not listen to her, it’s a demon in that boy, man. After his momma died . . . that’s all I am sayin’. I would hate to see him get put away. His preference to young girls is because of his illiteracy, and I felt like . . . when he done pissed on that girl and that video came out, it shouldn’ta been no more girls. It shouldn’ta been no more girls underage. It should not have been. And if they are, he has to answer to them.”
One thing I have always wanted to answer is the path the videotape took from R. Kelly’s gym bag to my mailbox on Grace Street on the first day of February 2002. In early 2019, as I struggled to pull together all the details from nearly two decades of reporting for this book, a few final pieces of information came to me as fortuitously as the fax in 2000, this time via Twitter. The first shed some light on the connection to the Nation of Islam.
Founded in Detroit in 1930, the NOI is a religious and political movement whose goal is to “teach the downtrodden and defenseless Black people a thorough Knowledge of God and of themselves.” At its peak, under the leadership of Elijah Muhammad, it numbered about three hundred thousand so-called black Muslims, including Muhammad Ali, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, which considers it a “deeply racist, antisemitic, anti-LGBT” extremist group. Malcolm X remains its most celebrated member, but he split from Elijah Muhammad in 1964 over differences about philosophy and politics. He also charged his former mentor with having adulterous affairs with young female acolytes. Malcolm X was assassinated a year after he broke from the group.
Today, by most estimates, Minister Louis Farrakhan leads between twenty and fifty thousand followers from the NOI’s headquarters at Mosque Maryam in the Stony Island neighborhood on Chicago’s South Side. October 14, 2018, was a Holy Day of Atonement for the group, as well as the twenty-third anniversary of the Million Man March. Members gathered at the five-thousand-capacity Aretha Franklin Amphitheatre in Detroit, and Farrakhan spoke for nearly three hours. A tweet steered me to videos on YouTube and the NOI’s website, pointing out a short part of that talk of special interest to me.
Fifteen months after my BuzzFeed News article about Kelly’s cult and three months before Lifetime aired Surviving R. Kelly, Farrakhan spoke about the biggest R&B star of a generation. “I had a four-hour talk with R. Kelly,” he began. The crowd booed and grumbled. Many wore street clothes, a striking contrast to the sea of suits and white habits seen in photos of Malcolm X addressing packed rallies during the NOI’s heyday. They had been in the minister’s thrall, until he mentioned Kelly. His followers clearly weren’t fans.
“No, no, no,” Farrakhan said with a smile, shushing the voices of dissent. “No, no, no. He came to our home with six of his friends, and I told him, ‘R., I have had a message in my heart for you for over twenty years, and I’m so glad for the opportunity to share it with you.’ He was managed by a friend of mine. What’s that brother’s name?”
“I said, ‘Barry, be patient,’” Farrakhan continued in a rolling cadence. “That boy is deeply spiritual. A man can’t write no songs like that and not have God all up in him. But he’s got to be cleansed. Do you understand what I’m saying?” The minister’s voice grew louder with every word, and now the crowd cheered him on. “All of you in here have done something wrong, but you are not evil people. Somebody’s gotta reach into you and bring out the God that’s in you and clear you of your evil!”
With that, Farrakhan got a standing ovation and moved on to other subjects.
Was any of the talk of violence serious, or was it all just talk? In Star Struck, the book Kelly’s former lover and confidante Kim Dulaney called a “thinly fictionalized account” of their friendship, the R&B star “Ben” says of the aunt of a girl trying to destroy him with a videotape, “I need her done. You know what I mean?” A member of Kelly’s crew made the menacing comment that if Hankerson tried to testify at the trial, “he probably wouldn’t have made it to Chicago.” In one of the few transcripts of a closed hearing that Judge Vincent Gaughan unsealed, prosecutors said they were considering pressing charges based on a sworn statement by Lisa Van Allen that Derrel McDavid said he should have “murked” her. Now Farrakhan claimed Hankerson said of Kelly, “I’m gonna get rid of him.”
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