shutuma za uhalifu wa ngono kwa teenage girls dhidi ya R. Kelly soma kisa hiki kikamilifu
Former Chicago Sun Times music reporter Jim DeRogatis, who broke the
story of R-Kelly's sexual predation on teenage girls 15 years ago, has
gone into great detail about some of the allegations, which the R&B
legend never went to prison for. What you're about to read will shock
you. R.Kelly didn't only marry a teenager, Aaliyah, he dated and
impregnated many of them...
Jim DeRogatis tells
The Village Voice
The accusations were stomach churning. The one young woman, who had
been 14 or 15 when R. Kelly began a relationship with her, detailed in
great length, in her affidavits, a sexual relationship that began at
Kenwood Academy: He would go back in the early years of his success and
go to Lina McLin's gospel choir class. She's a legend in Chicago, gospel
royalty. He would go to her sophomore class and hook up with girls
afterward and have sex with them. Sometimes buy them a pair of sneakers.
Sometimes just letting them hang out in his presence in the recording
studio. She detailed the sexual relationship that she was scarred by. It
lasted about one and a half to two years, and then he dumped her and
she slit her wrists, tried to kill herself. Other girls were involved.
She recruited other girls. He picked up other girls and made them all
have sex together. A level of specificity that was pretty disgusting.
Refresh our memories. How did this start for you?
Being a beat reporter, music critic at a Chicago daily, the
Sun-Times,
R. Kelly was a huge story for me, this guy who rose from not graduating
from Kenwood Academy, singing at backyard barbecues and on the El, to
suddenly selling millions of records. I interviewed him a number of
times. Then
TP2.com came out. I'd written a review that said
the jarring thing about Kelly is that one moment he wants to be riding
you and then next minute he's on his knees, crying and praying to his
dead mother in Heaven for forgiveness for his unnamed sins. It's a
little weird at times. It's just an observation.
The next day at the
Sun-Times, we got this anonymous fax --
we didn't know where it came from. It said: R. Kelly's been under
investigation for two years by the sex-crimes unit of the Chicago
police. And I threw it on the corner of my desk. I thought,
"player-hater." Now, from the beginning, there were rumors that Kelly
likes them young. And there'd been this
Aaliyah thing --
Vibe
printed, without much commentary and no reporting, the marriage
certificate. Kelly or someone had falsified her age as 18. There was
that. So all this is floating in the air. This fax arrives and I think,
"Oh, this is somebody playing with this." But there was something that
nagged at me as a reporter. There were specific names, specific dates,
and those great, long Polish cop names. And you're not going to make
that
crap up. So I went to the city desk and I asked, "What do we do with
this?" They said, Abdon Pallasch is the courts reporter, why don't you
two look into it and see if there's anything there? And it turns out
there had been lawsuits that had been filed that had never been
reported.
When you cover the courts in Chicago or any city, you go twice a day
and you go through the bin of cases that have been filed and every once
in a while Michael Jordan's been sued or someone went bankrupt and it's
this sexy story and you pull it out. These suits had been filed at 4
p.m. on Christmas Eve. Ain't no reporter working at 4 p.m. on Christmas
Eve, and they flew under the radar. So we had these lawsuits that were
explosive and we didn't understand why nobody had reported them.
So her affidavit, this testimony -- it's all public record?
To this day, any reporter who so cares can go to Cook County and pull
these records, so it drives me crazy, even with some of the
eloquent reconsiderations
we've seen of Kelly in recent days, that they keep saying "rumors" and
"allegations". Well, "allegations" is fair, OK. You're protected as a
reporter, any lawsuit that has been filed as fact. The contents of the
lawsuit are protected. So these were not rumors. These were allegations
made in court.
I had purposely not listened to his music since the initial
charges came out and I saw these ninth- and 10th-grade girls interviewed
on TV, talking about how he was in the parking lot of their school
every day and everyone knew how come. That is what it took for me.
Part
of our reporting was sitting with those girls, sitting with their
families, seeing their scars on their wrists, hearing the emotion.
Some of our young critical peers, they're 24 and all they
know of Kelly's past is some vague sense of scandal, because they were
introduced to him as kids via Space Jam. A lot of your
reporting on this is not online, it is not Google-able. Collective
memory is that he "just" peed in a girl's mouth.
To be fair, I teach 20-year-olds at Columbia. Ignorance is nothing to
be ashamed of. Nobody knows everything. A lot of art, great art, is
made by despicable people. James Brown beat his wife. People are always,
"Why aren't you upset about Led Zeppelin?" I got the Bonham three rings
[tattooed] on my foot. Led Zeppelin did
disgusting things. I read
Hammer of the Gods, I'm disgusted by the group sex with the shark.
[Note: it was actually a red snapper! Still gross.]
I have a couple of responses to that: I didn't cover Led Zeppelin. If I
was on the plane, like Cameron Crowe was, I would have written about
those things if I saw them.
The art very rarely talks about these things. There are not pro-rape
Led Zeppelin songs. There are not pro-wife-beating James Brown songs. I
think in the history of rock 'n' roll, rock music, or pop culture people
misbehaving and behaving badly sexually with young women, rare is the
amount of evidence compiled against anyone apart from R. Kelly. Dozens
of girls -- not one, not two,
dozens -- with harrowing lawsuits. The videotapes -- and not just one videotape,
numerous
videotapes. And not Tommy Lee/Pam Anderson, Kardashian fun video. You
watch the video for which he was indicted and there is the disembodied
look of the rape victim. He orders her to call him Daddy. He urinates in
her mouth and instructs her at great length on how to position herself
to receive his "gift."
It's a rape that you're watching. So
we're not talking about rock-star misbehavior, which men or women can
do. We're talking about predatory behavior. Their lives were ruined.
Read the lawsuits!
And there was a young woman who was pressured into an abortion?
That he paid for. There was a young woman that he picked up on the
evening of her prom. The relationship lasted a year and a half or two
years. Impregnated her, paid for her abortion, had his goons drive her.
None of which she wanted. She sued him. The saddest fact I've learned
is: Nobody matters less to our society than young black women. Nobody.
They have any complaint about the way they are treated: they are
"bitches, hos, and gold diggers," plain and simple. Kelly never
misbehaved with a single white girl who sued him or that we know of.
Mark Anthony Neal, the African-American scholar, makes this point : one
white girl in Winnetka and the story would have been different.
No, it was young black girls and all of them settled. They settled
because they felt they could get no justice whatsoever. They didn't have
a chance.
And they learned that after putting these suits forth and
having them get nowhere? Do you think they didn't get traction because
of the representation they had, or Kelly's power? Were certain elements
in concert with that?
I think it was a lot of things, including the fact that Kelly was
fully capable of intimidating people. These girls feared for their
lives. They feared for the safety of their family. And these people
talked to me not because I'm super reporter -- we rang a lot of
doorbells on the south and west sides, and people were eager to talk
about this guy, because they wanted him to stop!
Going back a little bit to our original question. So, you get this tape dropped in the mail...
Well, the tape came a year after we ran the first story. We ran this
story and the world shrugged. Associated Press picks it up: "
Chicago Sun-Times
has reported a pattern of sexual predation of young women by Robert
Kelly," and everybody says, "Ah, well, OK." Then one day I get this call
that says: Go to your mailbox. There's this manila envelope with a
videotape in it.
We had gotten one videotape already after the first story, and we
gave it to the police. When I say "we," I mean a roomful of editors
sitting around asking: What is the right thing to do here? This would
seem to be evidence of a felony, we should give it to police. There was
one tape, but the police could not determine the girl's age. The
forensic experts they had looking at it said judging by the soles of her
feet, they could tell she was 13 or 14 at the time this tape was made,
but we can't identify who the woman is. Videotape number one.
There were tapes on the street. And I had heard of another video tape
with a girl who was part of an ongoing relationship. This is the girl
who was in the tape that was in the lawsuit.
And some 40-odd people testified that it was her?
Yeah. Coaches, best friend's parents, pastor, half the family,
grandmother, aunt -- but the mother and father never testified, the girl
never testified. When we wrote our story about the tape, the girl and
mother and father took a six-month vacation to the south of France. We'd
been to the house several times. We'd rung the doorbell. This was an
aluminum-siding, lower-middle-class house on the South Side, with a
station wagon which is 13 years old -- you know what I mean? And now
they're in the south of France. And one time the dad got a credit as a
bass player on an R. Kelly album. He didn't play bass.
The situations are incredibly complicated, and sometimes there is an
element of: We're gonna exploit this situation for our favor. That
doesn't mean that it's legal or it's right or that girl wasn't harmed.
It tore that family apart.
How many people do you think you've interviewed? How many people came forward?
I think in the end there were two dozen women with various level of
details. Obviously the women who were part of the hundreds of pages of
lawsuits -- hell of a lot of details. There were girls who just told one
simple story, and there were a lot of girls who told stories that
lasted hours which still make me sick to my stomach.
It never was one girl on one tape. Or one girl and Aaliyah.
The other thing, the thing that people seem to not know: She was fresh out of eighth grade in this tape.
Fourteen or fifteen. That puts a perspective on it. She's not sophisticated enough to know what her kinks are.
Let's talk about what it is, aside from not just having
reportorial chops, that might hold somebody back. I feel that a lot of
younger journalists came up through blogs, not journalism school. They
are fearful to write about it because they don't know what they can say,
what language they can use, if they can be sued for even acknowledging
charges.
You may not know how to report, but you should know how to read. The
Sun-Times was never sued for the hundreds of thousands of words that it wrote about R. Kelly. You cannot be sued for repeating
anything
that is in a lawsuit. You cannot be sued for repeating anything that
was said during the six- or seven-week trial. It's in his record, and
then there's Kelly's own words. Then read [Kelly's biography]
Soulacoaster. It was not a pleasant experience for me to read
Soulacoaster! But read it, and read what he says in his own book! Do your goddamn homework!
What are the other factors?
Here's the most sinister. This deeply troubles me: There's a very -- I
don't know what the percentage is -- some percentage of fans are liking
Kelly's music
because they know. And that's really troublesome
to me. There is some sort of -- and this is tied up to complicated
questions of racism and sexism -- there is some sort of vicarious thrill
to seeing this guy play this character in these songs and knowing that
it's not just a character!
Songs like "Sexasaurus" kind of makes it novel. The ironic, jokey Trapped in the Closet
series airs on the Independent Film Channel and features Will Oldham --
that has these other hallmarks of "art" that read to a white, hipster,
indie-rock audience, then, because we are not taking certain things
seriously, we can choose not to take the lives of these young black
women seriously.
It puts it in the realm of camp or kitsch. If you have an emotional
reaction to a work of art and you use all your skills as a critic to
back it up with evidence and context. That's all we can ask of anybody.
We're all viewing art differently. The joy is in the conversation.
Pitchfork is the premier critical organ in the United States for smart
discussion of music, books, and artists, but it doesn't have
this discussion. Reviews his records but doesn't have the conversation about, "What does it say for us to like his music?"
I think, again, everybody has to individually answer. I can still
listen to Led Zeppelin and take joy in Led Zeppelin or James Brown. I
condemn the things they did. I'm not reminded constantly in the art,
because the art is not about it. But if you're listening to "I want to
marry you, pussy," and not realizing that he said that to Aaliyah, who
was 14, and making an album he named
Age Ain't Nothing but a Number
-- I had Aaliyah's mother cry on my shoulder and say her daughter's
life was ruined, Aaliyah's life was never the same after that. That's
not an experience you've had. I'm not expecting you to feel the same way
I do. But you can look at this body of evidence. You, meaning
everybody who cares!
You told me about the night after your critical review of R.
Kelly's performance at Pitchfork ran, one of these women called you at 2
a.m.
This happens a lot. If you are a good reporter, you are accessible to
people and you cannot turn a story off. And that sucks! The number of
times since I began this R. Kelly story that I was called in the middle
of the night, was talking to someone on Christmas Eve or on New Year's
Day or Thanksgiving.... Yeah, I got a call from one of the women after
the Pitchfork festival review. "I know we haven't spoken in a long
time...," and said thank you for still caring and thank you for writing
this story, because nobody gives a shit.
It was a horrible day and a horrible couple of weeks when he was
acquitted. The women I heard from who I'd interviewed, women I'd never
interviewed who said, "I didn't come forward, I never spoke to you
before, I wish I had now that son of a bitch got off." Jesus Christ.
Rape-victim advocates -- I don't believe in God -- they do God's work.
These young women who volunteer to be in the emergency room and sit with
a woman throughout the horrible process, I don't do that. I'm not
saying I'm even in the same universe. But somebody calls you up and
says, I want to talk about this or thank you about writing this, or, "I
can't sleep because I'm haunted, can you hear what I want to tell you?"
We do that as a human being. I would like to forget about this story.
I'm not saying I'm Super Reporter. I'm saying this was a huge story.
Where was everybody else?
There is a disregard for your ongoing concern about this.
"Let this go, Jim. Get over it, Jim. He was acquitted." You have never
dropped this, and your peers are pissed because it puts the rest of us
over a barrel. I can speak to this, too. It's often uncool to be the
person who gives a shit.
"You're jealous of R. Kelly, you're trying to make your name off his career."
Because you would love nothing more than to have to report and carry these stories of rape.
Rapes, plural.
It is on record. Rapes in the dozen. So stop hedging your words and when you tell me what a brilliant ode to pussy
Black Panties
is, then realize that the next sentence should say: "This, from a man
who has committed numerous rapes." The guy was a monster!
Just say it!
We do have a justice system and he was acquitted. OK, fine. And these
other women took the civil-lawsuit route. He was tried on very narrow
grounds. He was tried on a 29-minute, 36-second videotape. He was tried
on trading child pornography. He was not tried for rape. He was
acquitted of making child pornography. He's never been tried in court
for rape, but look at the statistics.
The numbers of rapes that happened, the numbers of rapes that were
reported, the numbers of rapes that make it to court and then the
conviction rate. I mean, it comes down to something minuscule. He's
never had his day in court as a rapist. It's 15 years in the past now,
but this record exists. You have to make a choice, as a listener, if
music matters to you as more than mere entertainment. And you and I have
spent our entire lives with that conviction. This is not just
entertainment, this is our lifeblood. This matters.
By WABHEJASANA
0 comments: