Soulless

by Jim Derogatis

  Kelly’s then-manager wanted me to “clear the air” with his client, he said, and Robert would very much like to meet with me. I seriously doubted that, but I told Mason I’d be happy to sit with Kelly for an on-the-record interview, no holds barred, preferably on video. (I called my editor at BuzzFeed, Marisa Carroll, saying I might need the biggest, beefiest camera crew she could provide, and I asked if I could expense a Kevlar vest, size 3X.) There were two conditions, Mason said: He’d like to see copies of all the lawsuits I kept writing about, and he’d need a list of my questions. I told him the lawsuits are public record at Cook County Circuit Court—though good luck finding them in that black hole—but I agreed to email him a list of questions, and after Marisa edited them and BuzzFeed media lawyer Matt Schafer vetted them, I did.

  I kept the list relatively succinct, limiting it to questions about Joy Savage, Azriel Clary, Dominique Gardner, Jerhonda Pace, and Reshona Landfair; the other women who told me about the cult; the books by Demetrius Smith and Kim Dulaney; the settlements for the lawsuits filed by Patrice Jones, the underage girl from the Rock ’N’ Roll McDonald’s; Montina Woods, the legal-age dancer on a videotape with Kelly; Tracy Sampson, the underage girl he met at the “Expo for Today’s Black Woman”; and Tiffany Hawkins, the first underage girl who sued him after they met in Ms. McLin’s classroom. Finally, I asked, what really happened with Aaliyah?

  Mason never mentioned the interview with Kelly again.

  The manager and I did continue talking, and a month later, Mason made another offer, saying he’d like me to speak with Joy Savage. Once again, he asked me to provide my questions, and once again, I did. That interview didn’t happen either. In January 2019, Mason surrendered to the Henry County Sheriff’s Office in Georgia on an outstanding warrant from the summer of 2018, when Tim Savage charged that he threatened to kill him and hurt his family because they wouldn’t stop trying to bring Joy home. Mason posted $10,000 bail and called the felony charge of terroristic threats a “miscarriage of justice.” By then, he’d resigned as Kelly’s manager and been replaced by Don Russell, another unknown in the music world. Russell claimed he’d been a friend of Kelly’s for thirty years, but former members of his crew told me they’d never met or heard of him.

  In early 2019, Kelly hired a new Chicago-based defense attorney. “Steve Greenberg has made a career out of representing what many consider the lowest of the low,” read the subhed of a profile by Lisa Bertagnoli in Crain’s Chicago Business. “‘The greatest rush in the business is when you know someone is guilty and you win the case,’ he says.” Acting as Kelly’s spokesman, Greenberg vehemently denied all the accusations against his client and branded all the women accusing him as liars. Many final attempts to get Kelly to comment for this book were directed to him. Greenberg acknowledged receiving my messages, but he ignored them.

  Kelly seems to think he can spin his way out of trouble, and he’d already made many of the arguments he offered in the March 2019 interview with Gayle King months earlier, in “I Admit,” an epic, nineteen-minute song in the mock-operatic mode of “I Believe I Can Fly (Remix)” and “Trapped in the Closet.” At a point where RCA/Sony Music was reluctant to release his new music, the star floated it on SoundCloud on July 23, 2018.

  “I admit I done made some mistakes,” the Pied Piper begins, “and I have some imperfect ways.” He proceeds to try to evoke sympathy for his inability to read or write, as well as for the sexual abuse he says he suffered as a child. As in “Heaven, I Need a Hug,” he condemns friends who betrayed him, managers who robbed him, and women who lied about him, all seeking one thing. “Where the fuck is my money?”

  “Only God can mute me,” Kelly sings, and he never admits any of his actions were wrong. “I admit I fuck with all the ladies, that’s both older and young ladies / But tell me how they call it pedophile because of that / Shit is crazy.” The song goes on (and on and on). “I got some girls that love me to pull they hair,” he sings. “Some like me to spank ’em.” Ultimately, he blames their parents. “Don’t push your daughter in my face / And tell me that it’s OK / ’Cause your agenda is to get paid / And get mad when it don’t go your way.”

  The singer poses some questions, too. “What’s the definition of a cult? / What’s the definition of a sex slave? / Go to the dictionary, look it up / Let me know, I’ll be here waiting.” Genius, the website that posts and annotates pop music lyrics, helpfully answered. It defined the characteristics of a cult, including “authoritarian leadership, isolationism, and opposition to independent thinking.” Genius concluded, “While it may not be a literal ‘cult,’ what Kelly is doing certainly has the features of one.”

  “I Admit” also gives me a shout-out. “To Jim DeRogatis, whatever your name is / You been tryin’ to destroy me for twenty-five whole years / Writin’ the same stories over and over again / Off my name, you done went and made yourself a career / But guess what? I pray for you and your family, and all my other enemies.”

  I really didn’t need the prayers, but I appreciated the sentiment, even if it was coupled with the dig that I’ve done nothing else in my career. (My Lester Bangs book was pretty good, and some of my students like me; there’s Sound Opinions, and I’m not a bad punk-rock drummer.) Ultimately, I found the math the most interesting thing about that verse. When Kelly released the song, I’d been “writing the same stories” for a little less than eighteen years, but it had been about twenty-five since Kelly ended his sexual contact with Tiffany Hawkins and began with Aaliyah, neither of which he’s publicly admitted.

  As the financial pressures mounted in 2018, property owners evicted Kelly from the mansion and the guest house in Johns Creek, Georgia, for $30,000 in back rent and fees, not long after a former member of his crew allegedly robbed all the furniture from those homes because he hadn’t been paid. The star also owed $170,000 in back rent for the recording studio on North Justine Street in Chicago, on top of fines levied by Cook County Judge Patrice Ball-Reed for illegally using a building zoned for manufacturing as a living space. City building inspectors visited the studio in mid-January 2019, and their photographs, which documented sixty-seven code violations and also showed a massage table, were quickly leaked. On January 23, the judge surveyed the photos. Stopping at one picture, she barked, “Christmas is over. This tree needs to go!”

  When Chicago decides to fuck with you, you are well and truly fucked.

  Ironically, the last major-label album of seventeen during Kelly’s career was 12 Nights of Christmas, released in late 2016. Although executives refused to comment, in early 2019, RCA/Sony Music dropped Kelly from its roster, with two albums left on his contract. Listeners greeted “I Admit” as a bizarre curiosity. “Born to My Music,” a jaunty stepping song bragging about all the children conceived to his grooves, also fell flat when Kelly self-released it on New Year’s Day, 2019. And that was only the start of a very bad year for him.

  After the six hours of accusations in Surviving R. Kelly began airing on Lifetime on January 3, the singer’s own children publicly condemned him. He was fighting lawsuits by Faith Rodgers, the Dallas woman, and a Mississippi sheriff’s deputy who charged that Kelly seduced his wife and gave her a venereal disease. More legal threats loomed from celebrity lawyers Michael Avenatti and Gloria Allred, who both got plenty of air time criticizing him. The #MuteRKelly movement was shutting down almost every concert he booked, and Spotify, after much criticism, had rolled out a feature that allowed users to tell the service “don’t play this artist” (a literal “mute R. Kelly” button, though they didn’t call it that). After ignoring requests to comment for the last year and a half, artists such as Lady Gaga, Phoenix, Chance the Rapper, Céline Dion, Ciara, Nick Cannon, and Syleena Johnson released statements criticizing Kelly. Some also pulled their collaborations with him from streaming services, the iTunes Store, and Amazon.

  On January 8, 2019, Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx held a press conference asking for witnesses hurt by the singer to come fo
rward. Foxx, a black, forty-six-year-old former sex-crimes prosecutor with the office, had been elected to replace Dick Devine in November 2016, eight years after he left the position. She said she’d watched all of Surviving R. Kelly, which had finished its first airing three days earlier. “I was sickened by the allegations. I was sickened as a survivor, I was sickened as a mother, I was sickened as a prosecutor. I worked in this office for a number of years, including in 2008, so the allegations were not new to me.” Foxx vowed to hold the star accountable.

  Kelly did not seem concerned. That night, he celebrated his fifty-second birthday at a party at a South Side nightclub called V75, and he performed his 1994 hit “Bump N’ Grind” to a taped backing track. The crowd sang along, and some of the women actually shouted, “Abduct me!”

  I learned on February 13 that Foxx’s office had convened a grand jury and was preparing to indict the singer. The website for The New Yorker published my story twenty-four hours later, on Valentine’s Day. Prosecutors had a new videotape, albeit it one that dated from the time of the first tape for which Kelly had been tried and acquitted, and which featured the same then-fourteen-year-old girl, Reshona Landfair. It had recently been “discovered” by Avenatti, who turned it over to the state of Illinois.

  Avenatti said he represented six clients, but he did not name them. He said two of his clients were victims; two were parents—Angelo and Alice Clary told me he represented them—and two were “whistle-blowers” he claimed had been close to Kelly. A prosecutor told me one of the latter was Charles Freeman, of “Chuck and Keith” fame from the first trial. Freeman had been the private investigator Kelly hired in the early 2000s but failed to pay in full to track down tapes “on the streets.” One of those had been stolen by Lisa Van Allen, she testified during the trial. In 2008, Freeman had promised to “reveal all,” and it seems as if he finally got around to it, a decade later, with help from the guy who brought the allegations by Stormy Daniels against the president into the national spotlight.

  News of the pending indictments launched a media frenzy that made the ink and airtime spent on Kelly’s crimes in the past pale in comparison. On February 21, my next piece for The New Yorker broke the scoop that the singer was also under investigation by three federal agencies. Based on probes by the FBI and the IRS, federal prosecutors had convened a grand jury in the Southern District of New York (the same office investigating Donald Trump), and it had issued at least one subpoena that I saw, to Kelly’s former manager Derrel McDavid. The investigative division of the Department of Homeland Security planned to convene a second federal grand jury in the Eastern District of New York, a senior official told me, to hear evidence against Kelly for sex-trafficking and violating the Mann Act that felled Chuck Berry. I heard from women in four states who’d spoken to me for my reporting and who’d been visited by investigators from that agency.

  Around 11:30 a.m. on February 22, I got a call from Jerhonda Pace. “They’ve got him!” she said. “They’ve finally got him!” Foxx’s office held a mid-afternoon presser to announce the second time the state of Illinois indicted Robert Sylvester Kelly. I covered it for The New Yorker, still a journalist on a seemingly never-ending beat, and Abdon joined me because, he said, he just felt like he had to be there. Foxx spoke for two minutes and twenty seconds, and she did not take questions. The state charged Kelly with ten counts of aggravated criminal sexual abuse involving four victims, three of whom were minors, for incidents that took place between 1998 and 2010. Each of the ten counts carries a sentence of three to seven years in prison.

  At that press conference and another twenty-four hours later, Foxx identified the victims only by their initials. Jerhonda told me she was “J.P.” Foxx said that “R.L.” had been identified in two scenes on a forty-five-minute videotape by her aunt “S.E.” She was obviously talking about Reshona Landfair and Stephanie Edwards, Sparkle. Abdon and I felt an overwhelming sense of déjà vu.

  Two investigators in New York told me they were frustrated that Foxx had “rushed” her charges, and that her office was not cooperating with them. They had hoped to issue joint state and federal indictments. “She was eager for the headlines,” one said. But everyone I talked to at the law enforcement agencies involved agreed, this was just the beginning of the end for R. Kelly.

  The singer turned himself in to Chicago Police at 8 p.m. on Friday, and he spent the night in Cook County Jail, waiting until bond could be set next door in the Criminal Court Building on Saturday afternoon. Media madness had descended on Twenty-Sixth and Cal. On Thursday, Empire actor Jussie Smollett stood in court and heard his bond set at $100,000 for charges that he staged a fake hate crime. That had been a circus, reporters and court personnel told me, but the crowd of a hundred journalists who swarmed for Kelly’s bond hearing on Saturday was twice as big, and the scene was much, much weirder. For one thing, Michael Avenatti was there. For another, a middle-aged white woman ushered Joy Savage and Azriel Clary in and out of court, past the hungry cameras.

  Joy and Azriel did not speak to the media, and Azriel never even looked at her parents, who sat several rows behind her in the courtroom. She and Joy stared straight ahead at Kelly, who displayed no emotion. The singer spent Saturday and Sunday nights in jail, too, while camera crews literally pitched their tents on the median strip across from the jail’s exit, waiting for him to emerge. When Kelly finally got out of jail on Monday night, he and several scruffy members of what was left of his crew went to what had been the Rock ’N’ Roll McDonald’s on North Clark Street. As always, the star seemed defiant, confidant he was untouchable, oblivious to his troubles—and pathological. He’d gone back to the scene of one of his alleged crimes. I wondered what Patrice Jones and her cousin Shareese thought.

  A few dozen fans who heard their hero was at the former Rock ’N’ Roll McDonald’s rushed to the parking lot and blasted his music from their cars. A quote from the singer resonated with me; he’d posted the video on his Facebook page in the spring of 2018. Cigar in one hand and what looked like a glass of cognac in the other, Kelly toasted a crowd of hangers-on at one of his his own never-ending parties. “Like a lot of you motherfuckers, I am handcuffed by my destiny,” he said. “It’s too late. They shoulda did this shit thirty years ago. It’s too late. The music has been injected into the world.”

  That is a deeply troubling thought. No matter what happens to Robert Kelly in the years to come, the music of R. Kelly will continue to reverberate. It will echo at times in the soundtracks of our minds, it will still be heard at a few of those backyard barbecues and family gatherings, and it will be played in some of the clubs on Saturday night and maybe even in some of the churches on Sunday morning. And it will never be just music.

  I must have been asked a hundred times by colleagues in the media scrums of those crazy days in late February if I felt “satisfied” that Kelly’s moment of reckoning had come. I felt only a profound sense of sadness. It was all too little, too late. I’m eager to take off the investigative reporter’s hat now and just be an investigative critic again, digging into the context, but mostly just listening. I’ve spent a third of my life reporting this story. I’ll save the debates about separating the art and the artist for panel discussions and my classes.

  On February 26, 2019, the headline for another media column by Margaret Sullivan of the Washington Post read, “Decades of investigative reporting couldn’t touch R. Kelly. It took a Lifetime TV series and a hashtag.” I don’t see it that way. All three played a role, but even that powerful combination wouldn’t have been enough if Kelly hadn’t finally run out of money. Above all, it was those who spoke out so bravely for so long that made enough people finally care to stop him. It was the girls. For me, it was always about the girls.

  AFTERWORD

  When Tiffany Hawkins asked her lawyer Ian Alexander to contact the Illinois state’s attorney on her behalf, the office chose not to pursue charges against a Chicago superstar based on the word of a girl who met him in her high scho
ol choir class. Alexander then filed a civil claim for Tiffany, the first to accuse the superstar of underage sex. Tiffany was the first girl to try to stop him, on Christmas Eve, 1996. If her name hadn’t been in a single anonymous fax that arrived after I wrote a record review, I’m not sure Abdon Pallasch and I would ever have started our investigative reporting, or that I’d have been motivated to continue what became a very long journey.

  Adopting the language of another literary-journalism hero, Randy Shilts, I always considered Tiffany “patient zero” in this story. Abdon had copied three pages from the Kenwood Academy yearbooks during Tiffany’s time there, and for almost two decades, I kept her photos in a folder on my desk to remind me what this story was really about.

  In mid-January 2019, Alexander still felt ethically bound by attorney-client confidentiality, but he didn’t object when the client he’d represented twenty-three years earlier asked him to set up a meeting with a reporter. Two inches of snow had fallen the night before, but it was already melting as the thermometer climbed toward the mid-thirties under a bright, warm winter sun. The three of us met in a coffee shop on the Northwest Side on a Sunday afternoon. I arrived early, because I always do. It’s a journalist thing, plus, I like to put the punk in punctual. Alexander showed up next. Then his client.

  Tiffany Hawkins gave her attorney a big, warm hug, and their mutual affection was obvious. They’d kept in touch over all these years, sporadically trading greeting cards, emails, and phone calls. Pictures of the kids, that sort of thing. They’d become part of each other’s lives. “She’s different than a lot of my clients,” Alexander said. “I don’t feel this way about all of them.”