R. Kelly's life trajectory from a Chicago survivor of abuse to a music industry mogul is dissected, revealing how he allegedly groomed minors by leveraging his status for career opportunities and financial security. Specific cases involving Tiffany Hawkins, Tracy Sampson, and the 2001 child pornography indictment highlight a pattern of out-of-court settlements with non-disclosure agreements, while the 2008 acquittal following witness recantation underscores systemic failures. Ultimately, the episode exposes how power dynamics normalized predatory behavior, allowing Kelly to continue releasing hits and collaborating with stars like Jay-Z despite mounting criminal allegations. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Trust Your Girlfriends00:02:06
This is an iHeart podcast.
Guaranteed human.
When a group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist, they take matters into their own hands.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He is not going to get away with this.
He's going to get what he deserves.
We always say that, trust your girlfriends.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I got you.
I got you.
I'm Lori Siegel, and this is Mostly Human, a tech podcast through a human lens.
This week, an interview with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
I think society is going to decide that creators of AI products bear a tremendous amount of responsibility to the products we put out in the world.
An in-depth conversation with a man who's shaping our future.
My highest order bit is to not destroy the world with AI.
Listen to Mostly Human on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Hey, it's Nora Jones, and my podcast, Playing Along, is back with more of my favorite musicians.
Check out my newest episode with Josh Groban.
You related to the Phantom at that point.
Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
That's so funny.
Share stay with me each night, each morning.
Listen to Nora Jones is playing along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ago Modem.
My next guest, it's Will Farrell.
Woo, My dad gave me the best advice ever.
He goes, just give it a shot.
But if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
The Heyday of R Kelly00:16:17
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of life.
Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Hello, friends.
I'm Robert Evans, and this is once again, Behind the Bastards, the show where we tell you everything you don't know about the very worst people in all of history.
And today, we have a special guest who we will be talking about a special subject with.
The guest, not a bastard, is Teresa Lee.
Teresa.
You don't know.
I could be a bastard.
Well, I don't know.
What is the technical definition?
Like that?
No, mom, no dad, no mom.
What?
Runaway dads.
Runaway dude.
Then you're a bastard, right?
Yeah, if your dad's gone.
Yeah.
Yes.
Yes.
Okay.
I mean, people don't use it for that anymore, really.
I made a mistake of getting a bag of cookies right before this started, and I was like, I'll just stack, but you can't eat cookies on a podcast.
You can't eat cookies on a podcast.
You know what you can eat?
Air.
I was going to say the truth.
Oh, yes, you can.
Okay, great transition.
Look at those transitions.
Really great.
Today we're talking about someone who we will be catching some fire on Twitter for talking about.
What do you know about R. Kelly?
Well, I don't know.
Like, I know, I think I know enough.
Like, I know what was big news, but I never decided to like open up the book and deep dive into R. Kelly.
So there may be things that are surprising to me.
But I will say, just before this podcast, I was like, let me look at all his songs again just to remind myself.
And I forgot that he sang the Space Jam song.
I believe I can flow.
Yeah.
So now I'm like rethinking playing that song in my head.
Well, outside of that, like, were you ever a fan of his music?
Do you remember any particular albums that like...
I never used to buy albums as a kid.
So he was sort of in his heyday.
His popular songs I would, you know, play and sing along to and dance to, but I wasn't a big album buyer until pretty much in the last couple of years because I wasn't really allowed to as a kid.
I would say, yeah, I have similar experience with him to where, like, as a 90s kid, I heard a lot of R. Kelly songs on the radar.
I liked, I did like a lot of the songs.
I didn't ever attribute it to him.
It was one of those things where it's like, I like this new song.
Oh, it's R. Kelly.
But it wasn't like, I stand for R. Kelly.
He was just a big part of the soundtrack of the late 90s and early aughts in particular.
I like that I'm a flirt song.
I think, does he sing I'm in love with the bartender?
No, that was definitely not right.
To T. Payne, that's right.
Okay.
So, but his era, he's around that era.
I feel like the T-Payne songs were on the radio, R. Kelly songs were on the radio.
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, he's like his.
They're fun to grind to, that sort of thing.
Definitely fun to grind to.
I think he has a couple of songs with grind in the name.
Yeah.
So let's hear about the fact that he probably has a sex cult.
Like, he's kind of a child pornographer, right?
Isn't that a thing?
People like know him for peeing on people, but wasn't she also underage?
We'll be getting into that.
It's actually very tough to answer that question definitively.
Like, it's one of those things where pretty much everyone's like, yeah.
But legally, he actually got off.
There was no.
Right, because there's no proof.
Wait, this does remind me, real quick, speaking of R. Kelly, the song I'm a flirt, when I was, I wasn't tech, I was technically underage, but nothing bad happened.
But I was.
Nothing bad.
I have to preface that so people don't get uncomfortable.
But that song, I remember I worked at a YMCA camp for a summer and I was like kind of talking to, in the way 17-year-olds do, very innocently doing nothing, but to like a 21-year-old football player at Stanford.
And we Stanford.
Yeah, we grinded to that song.
It was a fancy ass summer suit.
But okay, you grinded to him a flirt.
Kind of in tribute to R. Kelly because technically I was underage.
I was 17 years old.
So there you go.
Yeah, it was kind of like, oh, R. Kelly, hey, cool.
Get over here and get maybe put yourself in a questionable position.
Well, if I understand right, 17 is the age of consent for grind dancing in most of the Eastern seaboards.
He was respectful.
I feel like he was like, let's see how far you'll go.
And I will not push it.
You know what I mean?
Like, I feel like he was like, it's crazy.
It's crazy that that's the bar for being a good guy.
I'm not going to push it with this teenager.
He definitely didn't put a stop to it, but he went as far as I was comfortable and then did not push it further.
I got to tell you, Teresa, as a man, it is so easy to be a good guy.
Yeah, because it's just don't assault people.
Yeah, true.
Like, really, if you don't assault people, like, I've done a lot of shitty things, but as long as I don't assault people or gaslight them, like, I feel like I'm sailing.
I've gone years without paying my taxes, but none of that matters because the bar is just below the floor these days.
It's opposite for women.
If you just start a sentence with, I want, you're just automatically a bitch.
Well, I mean, men never express desire.
Sophie, would you get me a Celsius, please?
I want a Celsius.
Double flip off.
Well, we should probably get into the story now.
Yes.
Yeah, okay.
But I'm sure there will be a lot more fun conversations about gender politics to come.
I know that's what the audience really tunes in for.
Robert Sylvester Kelly was born in Chicago on January 8th, 1967.
His dad was absent from the get-go, and his mother, Joanne, raised him and his three siblings.
She was a school teacher and a committed Baptist.
Writing later in his autobiography, Solo Coaster.
Kelly Ricko.
Sorry, I had a little Amazon pause.
Yeah, his auto-solo coaster.
Solar coaster.
Oh, like a cool.
Like a roller coaster.
Yeah, exactly.
Of roller coaster of soul.
Okay.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You will be hearing that title regularly, and it will never not make me die just a little bit inside.
Just a little bit.
But, and the thing that I hate to admit is I kind of like the layout of the book.
Does it look like a roller coaster?
No, no, no, it doesn't.
It's just like, it's just neat.
I've never seen an autobiography.
Like, Kelly clearly.
There's a lot of ups and downs.
No, a lot of visuals.
Oh.
Like, he put a lot of thought into how he laid out his autobiography.
And it's one of those things.
You get this throughout the story.
It sucks.
Like, it's when someone like Harvey Weinstein, who's like a piece of shit, but like, I can't point to anything great he did.
Like, he's just a piece of shit who was tied to some good movies.
R. Kelly is like a really good artist.
Like, he's one of these people.
He's in like the running for the best R ⁇ B singer of all time.
And he's like, he's legitimately talented.
So, like, as you go through, like, as I'm reading his autobiography with its ridiculous, stupid name, I'm like, oh, wow, this guy's got a really good talent for layout.
And then I'm like, oh, yeah, and he's molesting children.
Oh, fucking Christ.
It's frustrating.
I don't know.
Maybe it's not.
I mean, someone else probably laid it out.
I don't know.
I feel like he's that kind of...
I think he's just too controlling to let someone else lay out his autobiography.
But we'll get to that too.
Anyway, we're a paradigm.
Solar coaster.
Solar coaster.
Yeah.
So in his autobiography, Solar Coaster, Kelly recalled that on the rare occasions he asked his mom what had happened to his dad.
This was her response.
Don't say nothing to me about that no-good son of a bitch because the minute he found out I was pregnant with you, his coward ass left, disappeared in the wind, didn't want to have anything to do with either you or me.
Kelly goes on to write, I remember my mother's eyes on one of those days, close to blood red as the anger grew and grew while she talked about my father as if he was the devil himself.
I remember my eyes getting baby blood red too because what my mother loved, I loved, and what she hated, I hated.
What's baby blood red?
I don't know.
That's not a color.
Baby blue is a color.
Baby blue red.
Baby blood.
I mean, maybe if you kill a lot of babies.
Oh, there you go.
Yeah, he's got babies on the mind.
I mean, I imagine a baby's blood would be a different color because a baby has not been subjected to all the same adultery.
Sure, they're not eating solid foods yet.
Exactly.
Okay.
So maybe if you've seen a lot of baby blood, it sticks out.
This is part of why I think he wrote it, too.
No ghostwriter is going to be like, baby blood red.
That sounds like it came out of R. Kelly's head.
It was that day, that moment, that I decided to hate my father, not knowing really what hate meant or having a clear understanding of love.
She told me on that day never to mention him again.
I'm your mother and your father, she said.
I promised her that I'd never talk about him again, and I never did.
Except for in his autobiography.
Yeah, clearly he hasn't pent that up or repressed any of that.
Yeah, well, that's his background.
Robert Kelly grew up very poor.
His family lived in the projects on the south side of Chicago, which, according to the song Bad Bad, Leroy Brown, is the baddest part of town.
In his autobiography, Kelly vaguely refers to his childhood home as being filled with numerous older women.
And it's unclear how many of them were related and how many of them were just around, but it seems weird.
It seems weird in Kelly's telling of it.
When my mother wasn't around, the women ran a little freer.
As I crept up in age, I found myself more curious and sometimes aroused, and I was ashamed of being aroused.
He says he was eight when he first saw people having sex, and the story he tells is kind of baffling.
He comes upon this couple getting it on, and they see him and basically give him the okay to watch, like look at him.
Oh, no.
Yeah.
On one occasion, I think later than this, he was handed a camera and asked by a couple having sex to take their pictures while they were having sex.
He recalls that the photographic technology impressed me more than the sex.
Maybe he's like repressed some of that memory.
That's sad.
This makes me sad.
Yeah, I know.
Well, I mean, it's one of those things.
You got to start with like, why did people do this?
That's another thing with Weinstein.
I don't know enough about his childhood to know like, was he abused a bunch as a kid?
Did that have an impact on it?
Not that that mitigates bad behavior because most people who are abused have to do it.
Right.
There's people who go both ways.
But this makes you understand what comes next a lot better.
This kid was never going to have an easy time coming up.
His barometer of what's appropriate and what's normal is off.
Right from the get-go.
Yeah.
Age eight seems to have been a crowded hour for young Robert Kelly.
It's the year when he first watched people fuck, first photographed people fucking, and it's also the year in which the love of his life died.
Oh.
Yeah.
Here is a quote from his autobiography, SoloCoaster.
Okay.
I love love.
There's no one on earth more romantic than me.
I've been in love with love ever since I can remember.
I've always loved the idea of having a girlfriend.
I love the closeness, the sweetness, holding her hand, kissing her cheek, whispering words of affection, and hearing her say that she feels the same about me.
My first girlfriend was named Lulu, and she was so special.
Though we were only eight and it was puppy love, I believe she was my first musical inspiration when it comes to love songs.
So, according to R. Kelly, Lulu died brutally that same year when he was eight.
At eight.
Yeah, at eight.
Wow.
Yeah, they were out playing near the river, and she fell in and bashed her skull open on some rocks.
Robert watched her die and was as traumatized as you'd expect.
That's about the most traumatizing thing I can imagine happening to an eight-year-old.
Wow.
Yeah.
Yeah, it doesn't get much worse than that.
There's like Littlefoot seeing his mom die and having your eight-year-old girlfriend bash her skull in on some rocks.
They're right up there.
So, this trauma was compounded several months later when Robert Kelly fell asleep in front of the TV and woke up from a, quote, crazy dream about three's company to find one of his older female relatives fondling him.
Oh, no.
Yeah.
He's never given a name for this woman, but she appears to be someone who is still around in his life.
He has not told his other family members who this was, and when Chris Heath, a writer for GQ, interviewed him about this later, he said, quote, I remember it feeling weird.
I remember feeling ashamed.
I remember closing my eyes and keeping my hands over my eyes.
I remember those things, but I couldn't judge it one way or the other fully.
So, Kelly says this mystery relative continued to molest him until he was roughly 15 years old.
She was not the only adult to go after child Robert.
A trusted male friend of the family once asked Kelly to masturbate in front of him.
He offered to pay.
R. Kelly later said, it was a crazy weird experience, but not a full-blown experience because it didn't go down.
Contact, sexual, no.
A visual, absolutely.
A visual from him showing me his penis and all that stuff.
Which is whether or not there's contact.
That's a nice thing.
He's kind of negotiating.
That's the thing that survivors do, is like negotiating.
Or maybe, or thinking, oh, this experience isn't valid because people have, quote-unquote, worse.
He didn't touch me, so it wasn't.
I should be like, these feelings maybe are invalid, but they're all valid because as long as you cross the line, it's, you know, that's molestation and assault.
Yeah, if a child and an adult comes up to you, asks you to masturbate and pulls out his genitals.
That's sexual assault.
Yeah.
100%.
Abuse of their power.
So he's got a rough upbringing, and this is not all of it.
Robert Kelly was probably shot when he was 13.
It's hard to know for sure what happened because he's not exactly a totally reliable narrator here.
For years, he told interviewers he had been shot by thugs who wanted to steal his Huffy.
In his autobiography, he claims the bullet was just a stray round from some gunfighter drive-by, though.
One of his close associates apparently told the Chicago Sun-Times that Robert shot himself during a botched suicide attempt.
This person says Kelly's version of the story is a lie invented to cover up the suicide attempt.
Most reports say he has a bullet in his shoulder, though, and if that's true, it does kind of make me think it was probably more likely a stray round than suicide, but I don't really know.
You wouldn't shoot your shoulder.
You definitely wouldn't have to.
It's very hard to miss a suicide unless you want to.
And even if you missed, it probably wouldn't be like a hard time.
Unless he was a kid, and he was like, oh, I'll do it here where it doesn't hurt.
Because Lil Wayne shot himself in like the back or something like that.
What?
Yeah, there was just a gun and a couch and he was playing with it.
Oh, an accident.
Yeah, yeah.
It was an accident with him, I think.
So, hard to say, but it looks like he probably got shot too when he was 13.
Either a suicide attempt or just a stray bullet because he lived in a rough part of town.
Whatever the truth, it's really clear that Robert Kelly had a very, very rough childhood.
Not an upbringing I would risk on anybody.
But it was not all an R-rated version of a Dickens novel.
He had a teacher, Lena McClinn, who recognized his nascent musical talent early on and nurtured it.
She convinced him to sing Stevie Wonder's Ribbon in the Sky for a high school talent show, Kelly's first performance in front of an audience.
He said about it later, quote, that night it was like being Spider-Man being bit.
I discovered this power.
I knew I had something then.
Miss McClinn got Kelly on TV for the first time, singing at a Christmas tree lighting ceremony in Chicago.
Now, Robert had no head for math or reading, and it actually sounds from what he says like he might be dyslexic.
It sounds like McClinn was instrumental in convincing his mom and him that in essence he should throw all of his effort into singing, into performing, because that's the thing he was clearly best at.
And that was definitely the right decision.
Kelly started busking on a subway as a teenager.
On one particularly good day, he made $400.
Wow.
So he gets into performing and realizes like this is something he's got a crazy talent for.
So as a young adult, he began booking more formal gigs, and it was during one set at a backyard barbecue at age 24 that R. Kelly was first discovered by the industry.
Wayne Williams, who worked for Jive Records, just happened to be at that barbecue.
Quote, I was inside the house and Robert was performing outside.
I saw this guy who had all the steps down, real choreographed.
You could tell he put a lot into it, which is something you don't usually see, especially at a backyard barbecue.
It was the eye of the tiger.
I'm not sure if he means that R. Kelly was singing the eye of the tiger or if he was responding more generally to like he was...
He was doing a kung fu.
Maybe he was rising up to the challenge of his rival.
Kelly began working with Barry Hankerson, an agent with real standing in the music industry.
Hankerson got him signed with the band Public Announcement.
Teresa, I'm going to show you a picture of the band public announcement.
I can't wait.
And I just want you to tell me what you know about their music based on this picture.
That's a kid.
It looked kind of almost like a boy band stance, you know?
Yeah.
But there's a woman in the middle.
There is a woman in the middle.
So it's a little off from that.
But otherwise, all of the guys look like boy band kids.
Yeah, I imagine there's some dancing involved.
And very 90s.
Hair, like hair touching, slicking back, kind of like nodding at the camera and pointing, that sort of thing.
And R. Kelly is wearing what looks like the 90sest windbreaker that has ever been purchased.
Aw, windbreakers.
Those are windbreakers, yeah.
He was on the cutting edge of that windbreaker trend.
Anyway, they dropped an album and it did pretty well, but Kelly almost immediately outgrew public announcement.
He released his and the windbreaker.
I mean, we all kind of outgrew the windbreaker.
Windbreakers and Boy Bands00:06:51
He released his first solo album, 12 Play, in 1993.
Wondering what the name 12 Play means?
Yeah, it definitely isn't alluding to his challenge.
Oh, geez, that's even dark.
That's really dark.
I don't know.
What does that mean?
What does that mean?
That's what I thought of first.
I mean, it's still messed up.
According to the Chicago Sun-Times, quote, it's because Kelly, quote, claims that while other lovers might give you four-play, he gives you three times more.
That's just like, okay, all right.
No, I mean, he's not good at math, so I mean, you gotta give it to him.
He put math in it.
He nailed the math.
Yeah, there you go.
Especially for his first album.
You know, you gotta conquer your fears.
He has math and words mixed up.
Tracks on the album 12 Play include such subtle titles as Bump and Grind, Sex Me, and this is my favorite.
I like the Crotch on You.
What?
I like the crotch on you.
All right.
You gotta love how just like, okay, you're really not hiding anything there, buddy.
Like, I like the crotch on you.
He's like, crotch is not a sexy word.
It's not.
It almost like, I feel like crotch just sounds, I don't know.
It sounds like it's like, like, it's not, I don't relate it to sex even though it's pointing to the organal nulls.
I relate it to like, I don't know, whatever it is.
No, just like jean.
Think of jeans because of crotch, but I think of like dirty jeans and like someone who didn't do their laundry.
That's what I think of when I think of crotch.
No couple in the throes of passion have ever said, bring that crotch on over here.
That would not, it's just not an attractive word.
Yeah, it's like something a tailor tells you about the crotch of your jeans or something.
Yeah, you're right.
Okay.
So, ridiculous as it sounded, 12 Play became the number one RB album in America for nine straight weeks.
Wow.
Huge success.
And apparently a great RB album.
And this is a solo album.
Yeah, this is a solo album.
I don't know much about RB, but one thing pretty much everybody seems in agreement on is that at his stride, R. Kelly was a hell of an RB singer.
So his career exploded after 12 Play came out.
He owed much of his success to his agent, of course, Barry Hankerson.
And it just so happens that Mr. Hankerson had a niece, a 15-year-old girl named Aaliyah Dana Houghton.
She had musical ambitions, a buttload of talent, and she soon.
Aaliyah Aaliyah?
Yep.
Oh, wow.
Yeah, this is that Aaliyah.
She soon started working with her uncle's top musician, the incredibly talented Robert Kelly.
He wrote a number of songs for her and acted as a producer on her first album, Age Ain't Nothing But a Number.
Kelly wrote that title, too.
Yeah, I'm not surprised.
Yeah.
In interviews at the time, Aaliyah talked about the many, many long hours she and R. Kelly put in together to make the album.
They were both perfectionists, and this led to numerous late nights spent in close proximity.
The album was a hit, selling more than 3 million copies.
And according to some people who know shit about RB, it was revolutionary in a number of ways in that genre.
I can't comment on that, but that seems to be the consensus.
However good the album was, it also led to something even less savory, or I guess exactly as unsavory as that title would suggest.
Almost immediately after the album dropped, Robert and Aaliyah were married at that most stereotypically romantic of destinations, the Sheraton Gateway Suites in Rosemary.
Wait, they got married?
Yeah, they sure did.
She was 15, he was 27.
Oh, my God.
Yeah, that's not okay.
What?
That's not okay.
I don't remember this.
I don't think we're being prudes to be like, I'm fine with someone dropping a song called I Like the Crotch on You.
You know, that's your own thing.
Here we've got something not okay.
Were they married for a long time?
No.
Okay, because I was like, I do not remember this.
How was this not the thing that made him?
Because he wasn't big enough.
He was pretty big at this point.
This was big news.
There was like a controversy over this that extends to today.
Because again, Aaliyah was 15, and that's a felony.
You can't be a 27-year-old marrying a 15-year-old.
It's not legal.
So, sometimes in a lot of states, you can actually marry at that age, but your family has to consent.
And Aaliyah's family had no idea any of this was happening.
In fact, the wedding was a secret.
The world only found out about it because several months after the fact, VIBE published the marriage certificate, which listed Aaliyah as 18.
So fraudulent marriage certificate.
No.
Big problems.
Now, the whole episode is somewhat murky and unclear, and there are a number of different narratives as to what precisely went down.
GQ's account of things is based heavily on the memory of Demetrius Smith, a somewhat shady character who worked for Kelly at the time.
He said this: quote, The week of the marriage, Smith recounts being in Miami on tour with Kelly and how Kelly explained that he had received a distraught phone call from Aaliyah saying she had run away from home, believing she was pregnant.
Smith says that Kelly was then given some specious advice, that he could protect himself from the legal ramifications of the situation by marrying her.
Smith's account of what happened next: during a break in the tour, Smith and Kelly flew together to Illinois.
Smith procured a fake state ID for Aaliyah from a friend in the public aid office, and they got a backup ID through someone they knew at Federal Express.
That night, after the ceremony in a suite at the Sheraton Hotel, Kelly and Smith flew back to Miami to resume the tour.
So is it, I mean, they were trying to do the paperwork by getting married to make it legal, but then they use fraudulent IDs, so it's the whole thing isn't legal.
So what's the point of that?
I mean, a couple of things.
Number one, keep in your head, this is before the internet.
So the odds that someone would find this were lower.
But the marriage is null if it was built on thing.
Yeah, so that makes no sense at all.
The whole thing is null.
They were hoping nobody would notice.
Oh, God.
When did she come out with, Are You That Somebody?
Because there's tons of random baby noises in there that I'm like, what the fuck is this?
And it's kind of just part of it.
But now I'm like, was it a secret message?
Like, was she like, I'm pregnant?
I think that was after.
She was a lot older.
Because if that wasn't from her, she lived until like 24.
So if that wasn't her first album, that's not on Age 8, nothing but a number.
No, that was with Rome.
I think it was the movie Romeo Must Die.
Oh, then, yeah, that would have been way later.
So she was an adult at that point.
She was sort of trying to slip in the story of her.
It's hard to say what happened.
Unborn child.
This is just one guy's relation.
Well, she didn't have the baby, right?
I don't think so.
No, no, she did not.
And we don't know if she was actually pregnant.
Again, this is like one person's version of the story.
Yeah, I don't know if this guy's reliable.
Yeah, and we don't really know 100% what went down because there were, you know, Aaliyah's parents found out and made them, you know, they annulled the marriage and everything.
And there was like a big legal settlement where he reportedly paid like $100 as like a token thing.
And then like they both agreed not to say anything about this.
And like no one said anything about it in the years since.
So we don't know what went down, but what I do know is that there are some fine products and or services that, Teresa, you're just going to love to hear about.
Ooh, I love the ad reads.
Aaliyah's Secret Marriage00:03:28
Yes.
Ads.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ago Modem.
My next guest, you know, from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network.
It's Will Farrell.
Woo, My dad gave me the best advice ever.
I went and had lunch with him one day, and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot.
I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
I'm working my way up through it.
I know it's a place they come look for up and coming talent.
He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
Yeah.
He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
And he's like, just give it a shot.
He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of luck.
Listen to Thanksgiving on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
10-10 shots fired.
City hall building.
A silver .40 caliber handgun was recovered at the scene.
From iHeart Podcasts and Best Case Studios.
This is Rorschach.
Murder at City Hall.
How could this have happened in City Hall?
Somebody tell me that.
Jeffrey, what did it?
July 2003.
Councilman James E. Davis arrives at New York City Hall with a guest.
Both men are carrying concealed weapons.
And in less than 30 minutes, both of them will be dead.
Everybody in the chamber's ducks.
A shocking public murder.
I scream, get down, get down.
Those are shots.
Those are shots.
Get down.
A charismatic politician.
You know, he just bent the rules all the time, man.
I still have a weapon.
And I could shoot you.
And an outsider with a secret.
He alleged he was a victim of flat down.
That may or may not have been political.
That may have been about sex.
Listen to Rorschach, murder at City Hall on the iHeartRadio app.
Apple Podcasts are wherever you get your podcasts.
There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
Rule one, never mess with a country girl.
You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
We always say that, trust your girlfriends.
I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of The Girlfriends.
Oh my God, this is the same man.
A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
I felt like I got hit by a truck.
I thought, how could this happen to me?
The cops didn't seem to care.
So they take matters into their own hands.
I said, oh, hell no.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He's going to get what he deserves.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Emotional Trauma and Settlements00:06:40
I'm Laurie Siegel, and on Mostly Human, I go beyond the headlines with the people building our future.
This week, an interview with one of the most influential figures in Silicon Valley, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
I think society is going to decide that creators of AI products bear a tremendous amount of responsibility to products we put out in the world.
From power to parenthood.
Kids, teenagers, I think they will need a lot of guardrails around AI.
This is such a powerful and such a new thing.
From addiction to acceleration.
The world we live in is a competitive world, and I don't think that's going to stop, even if you did a lot of redistribution.
You know, we have a deep desire to excel and be competitive and gain status and be useful to others.
And it's a multiplayer game.
What does the man who has extraordinary influence over our lives have to say about the weight of that responsibility?
Find out on Mostly Human.
My highest order bit is to not destroy the world with AI.
Listen to Mostly Human on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
We're back.
We're talking about Aaliyah and R. Kelly's very short-lived and super illegal marriage.
Literally, she was short-lived.
Well, yeah.
Yeah, she died in a plane crash when she was like 20-something.
Anyway, the settlement between Aaliyah and R. Kelly, we don't, again, know exactly what went down, but it's supposedly included a promise from Aaliyah not to sue R. Kelly in the future due to, quote, emotional distress caused by any aspect of her business or personal relationship with Robert.
She also agreed not to sue for, quote, physical injury or emotional pain and suffering arising from any assault or battery perpetrated by Robert against her person.
What?
So again, we don't know what went down.
We don't know what all was getting bandied about.
It's like, he was like, it's pre-me too, but like he already knew.
It's like he was like, okay, this kind of shit will come out later.
So I'm just going to totally cover my bases.
Well, it's not even like pre-me too.
Me too is just people finally getting angry about this.
This whole thing where like rich people.
Well, it's always been happening for sure.
But like the NDAs were more like, oh, I feel like it came from a, a lot of the men who make people sil or silence women, a lot of it in the past came from like, oh, I don't want it to hurt my reputation.
But the fact that he was already like, I know that you're going to go through emotional trauma that might not surface until 10 years from now and then you might want to talk about it.
He's like, hold up.
You don't know you're going to have this, but I know because I've been through it.
So don't talk about it.
Oh, shit.
Okay.
Now that's a good idea.
But I feel like he probably went through it.
And that's why he knows that there's going to be.
I don't think a lot of men in the past were like, you're going to have emotional trauma.
I think they're just like, I don't want to get caught.
I didn't even catch that, but I think you're right.
Yeah.
That's really insightful.
It's kind of dark.
I mean, it's both sad because it's like he's a victim or survivor himself, but also, you know, there's a cycle and he's perpetuating it.
Yeah, I think you're really onto something there.
So neither R. Kelly nor Aaliyah have ever provided more detail about what went down or the reasoning behind that weird settlement.
In 1997, Aaliyah filed to expunge the marriage certificate from the county court records.
The most detail she ever gave in an interview was with the Chicago Sun-Times in 1994, where she said, hey, don't believe all that mess.
We're close and people took it the wrong way.
But that was, again, like right when it happened.
Aaliyah died in a plane crash in 2001 at the age of 24.
R. Kelly has said almost nothing about her in the two decades since her death.
He doesn't even mention her name once in his autobiography, Solo Coaster.
There is, however, a disclaimer at the beginning that notes certain episodes could not be included for complicated reasons.
That's probably a reference to the court settlement.
During that 2016 interview with GQ, Kelly described Aaliyah as his best, best, best friend, which seems odd for someone he left out of his autobiography.
But again, probably was legally restricted from doing so.
In 1995, R. Kelly released his second solo album, just titled R. Kelly.
Three songs on the album reached number one on the RB charts.
Song titles include Down Low, Nobody Has to Know.
Little on the nose.
On December 24th, 1996, R. Kelly was sued for $10 million by Tiffany Hawkins, a high school student with ambitions for a music career.
She claims she met Kelly when he talked to her choir class.
Her teacher, Miss McGlynn, loved having Kelly come over to talk to her new students.
Kelly seemed to have loved flirting with the literal children in these classes.
I'm going to quote Jim Derogatus, the indispensable reporter on the R. Kelly allegations here.
I'm going to probably butcher this guy's last name.
How do you think that?
Derogatis?
Derogatis?
Yeah, maybe Derogatis?
Derogatis?
Derogatis.
Derogatis.
That sounds like Derogatus.
That's what we're going to land on.
Probably should have checked that when I was reading about R. Kelly for 11 hours.
Quote, asked about the charges in the Hawkins lawsuit that Kelly had sexual relationships with some of the freshmen and sophomore girls from McLynn's choir.
The teacher says, I don't know what he did outside of school, but in the school, there was no hanky-panky.
If they were involved in that, the sad thing is, it takes two to tango.
Oh, no.
This teacher is pretty shit.
It doesn't take two.
You're not a full person if you're underage.
Yeah, you're really not.
You can't be part of a two when you're not a full-grown adult.
You teach teenagers.
You know they're not real people yet.
You know that.
You teach them.
It's like if you put a puppy in a box and you're like, well, he didn't get out.
It's like, well, that's different.
You have more power.
You're a big person.
Hawkins claimed her sexual relationship with Kelly started in 1991 when she was 15 and he 24.
She says Kelly ended the relationship when she turned 18.
Hawkins slit her wrists immediately afterwards, a suicide attempt that she thankfully survived.
Also in 1996, while Kelly was settling the lawsuit over the teenager he allegedly molested into a suicide attempt, he met an adult lady, Andrea Lee.
Lee was a choreographer and a dancer who'd worked on his tour.
Andrea and Robert married and eventually had three children.
There are a few signs that the marriage was something less than super romantic.
The pair were almost never photographed together.
People close to Kelly told the Chicago Sun-Times that Andrea was required to knock before entering any room in their house while her husband was home.
And in 2003, several of Andrea's relatives complained to the Chicago Sun-Times that they weren't allowed to visit their daughter at the home she shared with Kelly or talk to her on the phone.
So consider that whole paragraph just a tancy bit of foreshadowing.
What does he say in his autobiography better?
Gym Fights in 199600:02:25
Solar coaster?
But what?
Solar coaster.
All up me.
No.
Okay.
A year later, or sorry, a little later in 1996, which was a very full year for R. Kelly, he ran into legal trouble again when he was arrested for battery in Lafayette, Louisiana, after a fight between himself, his entourage, and three random dudes at the basketball court for a local gym.
Now, he gets a pass on this one from me because why would you go to a gym basketball court if you didn't want to get into a fist fight with somebody in their entourage?
True.
What happens on the court stays on?
Nope, that's probably not true.
No, it is.
If there's one thing gym basketball courts are for, it's fist fights with famous people, and that's a sacred, that's a sacred thing.
I would say as long as you, I mean, to a certain degree, you don't want to beat someone's face to a pulp, but if there's a little bit of fighting on, like if it's more like closer to wrestling on any court of sport, as long as when the game ends, you're shaking hands, patting each other's back, and saying good game, then I think it's a little okay.
But I think if that's real aggression that's carried on past the game, then you're like, oh, that was a real fight.
I think it all depends on whether or not someone has an entourage.
Because if there's an entourage, there's no option but to have like a really showy choreographed fist fight.
It's like a gang.
We don't really have the big old West Side Store gangs the way I don't even know if they ever really did do those dancy fights, but now I feel like you got fight on the court.
I imagine if I ever got into a fight with Aston Kutcher, he would have a dancing and singing entourage that I would have to fight my way through first.
But yeah, despite all of its ups and mostly downs, 1996 ended on a high note for Robert Kelly.
The movie Space Jam was released in December of that year, permanently delighting my former boss, Daniel O'Brien, and making R. Kelly a household name.
His hit song, I Believe I Can Fly, was basically everywhere for like six months.
It was the number two song in America.
I was like eight at the time, and a tremendous number of my early memories involve hearing R. Kelly's voice over the shitty speakers at a blockbuster or a Piggly Wiggly or what have you.
Also a bad man, Michael Jordan.
Well, I don't know much about Michael Jordan to be honest.
Not as bad, but not a nice guy.
No comment until I do the digging on him for the Michael Jordan episode.
Kelly's mother died in March of 1997.
Rewriting the Past00:09:05
This was a devastating blow to the self-described mama's boy, as it would have been for anyone.
Shortly after this, Robert announced on stage with a gospel preacher that he had given himself over to Jesus.
His autobiography contains numerous religious references.
He's been very consistent about the importance of faith to him over the years.
Yeah, R. Kelly's desire to get right with God, however, did not inspire him to get right with the Justice Department.
In June 1997, he missed his keyring on the battery case over that basketball court fight.
He wound up having to settle out of court with the men for an undisclosed sum the next month.
Settling with people for undisclosed sums of money would grow to become R. Kelly's number one hobby over the next 20 years.
In 1998, he settled his lawsuit with Tiffany Hawkins, the teenager he, yeah, attempted suicide, reportedly for $250,000.
The settlement came four days after Hawkins delivered a horrifying seven-hour deposition.
And in a way, it was too little too late.
News of Kelly's escapades with Hawkins began to leak.
A young woman who'd been prepared to testify about being in the threesome with Hawkins and Kelly while Hawkins was underage told the Chicago Sun-Times, quote, I'm not trying to down him because I honestly think it has to be a sickness.
Looking at pictures of me and Tiffany when we were freshmen, boy, we were ugly little girls compared to what he could have had.
So I didn't understand why he did what he did.
Oh, that's also like a sad sort of trying to justify and make things feel normal.
Like as a survivor, I feel like she's also like trying to explain or, you know, make it move on without being stuck in the moment.
Yeah, I'm not going to, I'm not going to judge her for that, but it is weird.
That's hard.
Yeah, that whole article was published in 2000.
It includes a lot of really unsettling information.
Quote, according to Hawkins' lawsuit, Kelly had sex with underage girls in his apartments at 9S Wabash, 185 North Harbor Drive and other locations in Chicago.
In response to questions from Hawkins' attorneys, Kelly admitted that he employed Hawkins as a background vocalist and periodically gave her small cash gifts and approximately $1,400 in checks, but he denied having any sexual contact with the girl.
Now, Hawkins' friend, who was prepared to testify, did make it clear that R. Kelly did not force himself on her sexually.
He treated us very well, she said.
We got anything we asked for, but we weren't going to ask for much.
A pair of Air Jordans or $100 was a lot of money to us.
I still love R. Kelly's music.
I don't hate him, she added.
He reminds me of a boyfriend who hurt you that you still love.
He hurt me by not helping me out and telling me to drop out of school.
He told me and Tiffany both, if you want to be serious about the music, you have to be at the studio and not at school because school isn't going to make you a millionaire.
At 16, that's like a dream to us to work with R. Kelly.
So we listen to him.
I think it's a sickness.
Yeah, I mean, that's rough.
She's definitely negotiating with herself.
And there's no, you know, right or wrong from a survivor's point of view because it's like how she feels is how she feels.
And, you know, sometimes to move on, you have to the narrative in her head, it doesn't mean it's wrong.
You know what I mean?
Like, clearly he crossed a line from an objective point of view, but from her point of view, I don't think we could fault her for wanting to think of him fondly because otherwise she has to move on with her life feeling like this bad thing happened, which it did.
But it's okay if she wants to live her life feeling a little bit more normal.
And it's also, it's, you know, the bargain he put these young women in was essentially the way he was making them think of it is like, okay, parts of this may be creepy.
I may not like parts of this, but like.
Other parts are to her good.
Well, yeah, like I'll get to be a millionaire.
Even if she felt like she consented or maybe he didn't ever, maybe he didn't ever quote unquote force himself, but just by nature of him being an adult and them being kids and him treating them that way already, he's like grooming them to feel like they owe him.
I would argue that even if they'd both been 18, the money here would have been an element of force.
Not that he was offering them, but because coercion.
Yeah, it's coercion of like, if I put up with this for a while, then I'll have a career in the music industry and I'll never have to worry again.
He was definitely abusing his power.
Yeah, yeah, in a couple of ways.
Like his power as like an older man who's wiser in the world than these 15-year-olds and his power as a gatekeeper to celebrity.
But there's also like there's so much new.
I mean, bottom line, it's wrong.
You know, he crossed the line, bottom line.
I want to preface that.
But I also want to, the nuance of like someone, he was a survivor as a kid.
And part of him maybe the part that, you know, he never dealt with maybe wanted to rewrite a little bit.
So maybe he did treat them really well and didn't force them in a way to kind of rewrite.
Like, what if when this happened to me, it was sweet and kind and they didn't force it.
So in a way, he may have been trying to rewrite his own past that way.
Still bottom line, wrong.
And there should have been more resources in place to help him get through his trauma so that he knew how to properly deal with it.
But there is a world where maybe like maybe he thought treating them well and then going to sex would kind of be like, oh, there can exist a relationship that's because he's trying to justify what happened to him.
Yeah, he's not like most people who do really bad things.
I doubt he's going into this was like, no, I think the way he wanted to sort of put some sort of meaning to what happened to him and make it feel like it wasn't so bad, because in his mind, he's like, well, if I could have a relationship with a kid that feels even, or in his mind, it's even.
He's like, they like this.
Then that can mean maybe when I was a kid, it wasn't so bad to have.
Like he's trying to rewrite a little bit what happened.
Yeah, I can see something like that going on in his head.
Can see that being like a way to sort of deal with, like, crush your conscience a little bit as you start to be like, this is fucked up.
What you doing, Robert Kelly?
It's the same about himself.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Or his actions in this particular instance.
Well, let's read the next paragraph.
In 2001, Tracy Sampson sued Robert Kelly for bringing her into an indecent sexual relationship when she was just 17.
She claimed she was treated as his personal sex object and, quote, he often tried to control every aspect of my life, including who I would see and where I would go.
Her case was settled out of court for an undisclosed sum.
Kelly was sued in successive months in 2002, once in April and again in May by two different women.
One claimed he impregnated her while she was underage.
Another claimed he'd filmed a sex tape of them without her knowledge or consent.
According to the BBC, quote, the recording was allegedly circulated on an R. Kelly sex tape sold by bootleggers under the title R. Kelly XXX.
In both of these cases, R. Kelly settled out of court for undisclosed sums.
I feel like that song track should have been called Age is Just an Undisclosed Sum.
That's really good.
That's really good.
Both of these women found NDAs.
I found a telling quote, though, from a BuzzFeed article that interviewed a lawyer who's been involved with several of R. Kelly's settlements.
Chicago attorney Susan E. Loggins declined to say how many settlements she has negotiated with Kelly before lawsuits were ever filed, but she said they were numerous and recently included one for a 17-year-old aspiring singer from Chicago's West Side who is said to have been part of Kelly's inner circle.
So it seems like for every one of these cases I've read, there's many, many, many others that never proceeded to trial because the victim just went to Kelly straight away and they worked out a settlement.
So like the people we're talking about on this are probably not the only people who could come forward with allegations if they hadn't already gotten paid and signed an NDA.
You know, it's like with the Weinstein thing.
Literally the month after those two cases, Robert Kelly was charged again, this time with filming illegal sex videos.
This is the R. Kelly case you've all heard about, the P-Tape, because the actress in this tape that was circulating underground was allegedly underage.
Kelly was charged with 21 counts of making child pornography.
So the backstory of this one is a little bit interesting.
So we're going to peer back for a little bit to November of 2000 when Kelly released the album TP2 to a number one debut on the Billboard Albums chart.
It featured two number one RB hits, I Wish and Fiesta.
It also featured songs like The Greatest Sex and Feeling on Your Booty.
The album reviewer for the Chicago Sun-Times was Jim Derogatus.
He wrote this about it.
One minute he's grabbing his privates and bragging of being like a real freak.
The next he's drawing on his gospel roots and once again paying homage to his dear departed mom on the lush and touching single I Wish.
Prince, Marvin Gaye, and Al Green all showed that in the right circumstances, sex and prayer can be the same thing.
Kelly has yet to combine the two in one song, so he has yet to make the transcendent record he's been promising throughout his career.
His lyrical shifts from church to street corner are still so jarring that they can give you whiplash.
So you can tell there, Doragatus hardly came into the Kelly case as a hater, but it was probably this review that would contain the seeds of Robert Kelly's downfall, or at least probable downfall.
One of R. Kelly's assistants read the review and sent this letter to Doragatus.
You wrote about R. Kelly and compared him to Marvin Gaye.
Well, I guess Marvin Gaye had problems too, but I don't think they were like Robert's.
Robert's problem is young girls.
I've known Robert for many years and I've tried to get him to get help, but he just won't do it.
So I'm telling you about it, hoping that you or someone at your newspaper will write an article about it, and then Robert will have no choice but to get help and to stop hurting people he's hurting.
This is his assistant?
This is one of his assistants.
Yeah.
Assistants Speak Out00:05:25
So we will talk about what comes this later.
But before we get back to the R. Kelly sex tape, you know what's better than a sex tape that is probable child pornography?
This is not a good ad plug.
Oh boy.
We're spiraling.
Anything.
Anything.
Celsius.
The only energy drink currently on this table that's also not involved at all in R. Kelly's alleged sex crimes.
Here's some other ads that paid us.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ago Modem.
My next guest, you know, from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network, it's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
I went and had lunch with him one day, and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot.
I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
I'm working my way up through and I know it's a place they come look for up and coming talent.
He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
Yeah.
He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
And he's like, just give it a shot.
He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot in luck.
Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.
10-10 shots fired in the City Hall building.
A silver .40 caliber handgun was recovered at the scene.
From iHeart Podcasts and Best Case Studios, this is Rorschach, murder at City Hall.
How did this ever happen in City Hall?
Somebody tell me that!
Jeffrey Hood did it!
July 2003, Councilman James E. Davis arrives at New York City Hall with a guest.
Both men are carrying concealed weapons.
And in less than 30 minutes, both of them will be dead.
Everybody in the chamber ducks.
A shocking public murder.
I screamed, get down, get down.
Those are shots.
Those are shots.
Get down.
A charismatic politician.
You know, you just bent the rules all the time, man.
I still have a weapon.
And I could shoot you.
And an outsider with a secret.
He alleged he was a victim of flat down.
That may or may not have been political.
That may have been about sex.
Listen to Rorschach, murder at City Hall on the iHeartRadio app.
Apple Podcasts are wherever you get your podcasts.
There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
Rule one, never mess with a country girl.
You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
We always say, trust your girlfriends.
I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of The Girlfriends.
Oh my God, this is the same man.
A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
I felt like I got hit by a truck.
I thought, how could this happen to me?
The cops didn't seem to care.
So they take matters into their own hands.
I said, oh, hell no.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He's going to get what he deserves.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I'm Lori Siegel, and on Mostly Human, I go beyond the headlines with the people building our future.
This week, an interview with one of the most influential figures in Silicon Valley, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
I think society is going to decide that creators of AI products bear a tremendous amount of responsibility to products we put out in the world.
From power to parenthood.
Kids, teenagers, I think they will need a lot of guardrails around AI.
This is such a powerful and such a new thing.
From addiction to acceleration.
The world we live in is a competitive world, and I don't think that's going to stop.
Even if you did a lot of redistribution, you know, we have a deep desire to excel and be competitive and gain status and be useful to others.
And it's a multiplayer game.
What does the man who has extraordinary influence over our lives have to say about the weight of that responsibility?
Find out on Mostly Human.
My highest order bit is to not destroy the world with AI.
Listen to Mostly Human on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
We're back.
And we've just been slammed into our first free real ad of the day for Diet Mountain Dew.
The only caffeinated beverage currently in my hand because I didn't want to make another coffee.
Why are you holding a skateboard?
Because of radical.
Do the sound of a half-pipe.
Police Investigations Begin00:05:58
I thought you were going to say, do the sound of a hang-loose.
No, there's no sound of that.
You just got to put it in your voice.
I can hear it when you do the hand gestures.
Yeah, you're hanging loose.
There's no way to do that sign without sticking your tongue out.
Like it just happens.
No.
It's required.
It's the law.
Speaking of the law, let's talk about R. Kelly's 21 charges of child pornography making.
When we last left off, Jim DeRagatas at the, who I will be pronouncing differently almost every time we talk about him, reporter at the Chicago Sun-Times, had just gotten an anonymous letter from one of Kelly's assistants being like, R. Kelly's got a real problem with young people and somebody needs to do something about this.
So as a journalist, getting a letter like that is a legally prickly thing.
Anytime you're considering breaking a story that would accuse someone of multiple felonies, you've got to be on guard.
A letter like that on its own is not super journalistically actionable.
Running the letter alone would not be the best practice.
So nothing happened at first.
This may have prompted the person in Kelly's orbit to push again.
A videotape was sent to the Chicago Sun-Times by some anonymous person.
The tape showed Kelly having sex with an extremely young person.
Because this was super likely to be evidence of a crime, and because if it was evidence of a crime, it would also be child pornography.
The Chicago Sun-Times went to the cops.
The police couldn't.
Because how isn't that if you even look at it?
So if you get sent a video like that, you have to call the feds.
Yeah, you have to immediately bring in the well, I think they go to the local police.
I'm not sure if they go to the feds.
They go to the cops.
They don't have to custom cops.
Certainly not with child porn.
But the police open up an investigation, but there really wasn't much that they could do because they didn't have like, you don't know the age of the person.
You don't know for sure that this is R. Kelly.
You just have these claims.
So they kind of wait for a little while.
And, you know, somehow, you know, right around this time, tapes of R. Kelly, bootleg sex tapes of R. Kelly with young women start floating around.
There's multiple tapes.
They are not all underage people.
Kelly apparently has his sex taped regularly.
So somebody in his orbit was leaking these, not just to the press.
I have not watched the R. Kelly P tape, but this is when the R. Kelly P tape that's famous gets out into the world.
So people were watching.
Because I remember hearing the news, and I guess people, some people were watching it, but if you watch it, isn't that...
They weren't all child pornography.
Okay, but it wasn't that...
I don't know much.
I just remember, I didn't even know she was underage.
I just remember there was a P-tape and a dungeon.
And then there was like a dungeon.
Yeah, yeah, and that's part of this house and stuff.
Yeah.
Okay.
So whoever started sending these anonymous tapes to the Sun-Times eventually got fed up that nothing had happened yet.
This person left another video in Jim DeRugatus' mailbox.
He sent it to the police as well, and they were finally able to make an ID.
They found a source who claimed to recognize the young woman in the video as her niece.
She basically was able to name the kid, and like Kelly says the first name in the video, so the police were pretty sure that they had the right person.
And so the cops give the Chicago Sun-Times the go-ahead to publish their first story on the matter.
That's a terrifying.
I mean, I know they're just investigating.
They have to do their job, but that's terrifying to have to, like, your sex tape is not only getting leaked, but then people are like, do you know this girl?
And, like, asking your family members.
Well, they weren't going straight to Kelly at first.
No, weren't they asking she recognized the girl as her niece?
Yeah, they found...
That means her aunt or uncle watched the sex tape to identify her.
They probably saved a, like, had just a clip of the girl's face or something.
I doubt they played the whole tape for this lady.
But, like, they heard a first name, and I think they narrowed it down because they had some, like, they feel like they have enough that the police charge him with 21 counts of child pornographizing.
Wow.
Because the aunt of this girl claims she would have been around 14 at the time of the filming.
So, R. Kelly, who had just performed at the opening ceremony of the Winter Olympics, was forced to respond personally.
Quote, it's not true.
All I know is this.
I have a few people in the past that I fired, people that I thought were my friends.
That's not my friends.
It's crap, and that's how we're going to treat it.
The reason these things are happening, I really do believe, is because of the fact that I didn't fall back as far as blackmail was concerned.
I didn't give them any money.
So, R. Kelly was indicted for child porn on June 5th, 2002.
He pled not guilty the next day and posted bail using $7500 bills.
Once he got back from court, he immediately violated a court order by singing at a kindergarten graduation ceremony.
Wait, $700, like, single-dollar bills?
Is that what you're saying?
No, no, no, $100 bills.
Oh, I was like, what?
He just has just to be petty?
Like, why?
No, he just had a shitload of cash left.
$100 bills.
Okay, gotcha.
That makes sense.
Yeah.
So at this point, the grinding wheels of the justice system set into motion.
Jury selection did not begin until June of 2008, six years after the charges were filed.
This is not normal.
As an MTV article pointed out at the time, quote, in the last six years, Michael Jackson was charged, tried, and acquitted of molestation.
Phil Specter was charged and tried for murder.
And due to a mistrial, he'll have to do it all again.
Lil Kim was charged, tried, and convicted of a conspiracy and perjury.
And she even found time to shoot a reality show while she served her sentence.
So all that happened while R. Kelly's case was waiting to actually go to trial.
Now, delaying this case was very definitely a strategy used by R. Kelly's defense.
They probably figured that since his alleged victim was expected to take the stand, it would be better optics if she were in her 20s rather than still a teenager when she had to do it.
So first off, they waived Kelly's right to a speedy trial, which would have required the case to take place in four months or the charges would have to be dropped.
They also filed 30 some odd pretrial motions, all of which demanded a response from the prosecution and usually led to an argument in court.
This always delayed things further.
There were also some freak happenings that disrupted matters.
The judge fell off a ladder and injured himself.
R. Kelly's appendix burst.
Then his lawyer died.
Fell off a ladder.
Fell off a ladder.
There's some weirdness around the judge in this case.
We'll get to some more of that later.
During the six years while he waited, Robert did not exactly shut up and just sort of hunker down.
Freak Happens Disrupt Trial00:05:17
Like a month after the charges were filed, he released a single, Heaven, I Need a Hug, which was basically his plea of innocent in the court of public opinion.
Here are some lines from Heaven I Need a Hug.
And as for Robert, here's what I need to do.
Get rid of them clowns and get myself a whole nother crew.
Media, do your job, but please just don't make my job so hard.
Somebody please pray what I'm talking about.
I'm still young trying to figure it all out.
Heaven, I need a hug.
Is there anybody out there willing to embrace a thug?
So.
Yeah.
He needs a hug.
He's using his music as a way to get people to get on his side.
It's a powerful tool.
The question of his guilt or innocence is actually a semi-regular theme in R. Kelly's music.
For example, in the album Chocolate Factory, during a 10-minute mini-opera, R. Kelly finds himself at the gates of heaven.
St. Peter denies him for his sins, but then Jesus absolves him.
The same scene apparently plays out in the album Loveland as well.
In the middle of a 20-minute remix of I Believe I Can Fly.
So it's a regular reoccurring theme in Kelly's music.
His career continued to chug along in the early aughts, but even his work wasn't free of drama.
In October of 2004, he and Jay-Z released their second collaborative album, which did predictably well.
They started touring together and things were not smooth.
During a performance in St. Louis on October 23rd, Kelly left the show after getting into a screaming argument with the lighting technicians.
He actually left the venue, drove to a random McDonald's, and spent hours serving food to customers through the drive-through window.
What?
Yeah.
Chicago Sun Times' coverage sheds a little light in how Kelly's people spun this.
It's fucking weird.
Kelly's attorney, Ed Genson, confirmed reports Monday that Kelly headed from St. Louis's Savva Center to a McDonald's restaurant that had closed, but which he persuaded to reopen for the entourage traveling on his bus.
Then he decided he wanted to work the drive-thru, Genson said.
It was on the radio.
People were running out of their houses to have R. Kelly serve them.
Kelly is a big McDonald's fan who has stopped and worked at the drive-through windows of McDonald's restaurants before.
In a prime-time live interview that aired in October, he talked about frequent visits there with his late mother.
We'd go to McDonald's almost every morning.
She'd drink her cup of coffee.
She'd wear this cheap lipstick and she'd leave this red lipstick around the cup, Kelly said.
That, well, first of all, to McDonald's for being so big that that's not even a thing you associate with McDonald's.
It's just a house.
It's just like going to the store.
You know what I mean?
To be like, he served people.
It's like if you were a small brand, it would be like and R. Kelly was just decided to work for you for a day.
Like that would be the biggest thing that happened to you.
But McDonald's is so big, you're just like, you don't even associate that with the brand.
I feel like this has to have been a franchisee, though, because I feel like McDonald's corporate, if some if they'd been asked, like, should we have this guy who's being indicted for child pornography work at our drive-through window?
I feel like the CEO allowed to go in to eat.
Well, yeah, but I feel like Ronald McDonald would probably be like, yeah, we don't want that guy working the window.
Right, right.
But I'm going to guess.
Yeah, it was some like local franchise owner who was like, well, fuck, this would be good business.
McDonald's in St. Louis.
Yeah.
I feel like.
Would you have gone if you were there at that time, like knowing what was going on, but like, he's not found guilty yet?
Like, as a normal person, would you be like, I'm going to go get food from the R. Kelly at the drive-thru.
You know what?
I'll say this.
I'll say this.
As someone who was born in St. Louis and who has been there a number of times in my life, if I was going to get handed French fries by a child pornographer, I would expect it to be at a McDonald's in St. Louis.
Uh-huh.
Yeah.
That's the kind of thing, looking back, I'm like, oh, on principle, I wouldn't want anything to do with him.
But I'm like, if I was there at that time and someone was like, dude, R. Kelly's handing out burgers down the street.
I mean, like, I'm going to be totally honest.
I probably would drive through.
Like, I don't, like, I'm not saying that's the right thing to do, and you can, like, whatever, come at me, but I'm being honest.
I think I would have gone.
So, okay, let me let me let me posit this to you.
If, like, Mel Gibson gets no, because I don't care about Mel Gibson.
I don't think that's a good idea.
Okay, it would have to be someone you care about.
No, I guess I don't care about R.
Yeah, what is a difference?
Maybe the public opinion thing did make a difference, him singing about himself.
Because I'm like, you know what I mean?
Like, he seems more human.
I mean, he was super popular, though, too.
I mean, already outside of all this.
So, I don't know.
I think if it was someone like, okay, William Shatner is a famous person I love who I'm sure has done horrible things that I just haven't heard about.
He must have done anything about him.
Oh, he has to have.
Look at him.
Look into his eyes.
But he just looks like a character actor who plays that.
I think he could be totally sweet.
We don't know.
If any member of Hollywood has killed someone for money, it's Bill Shatner.
Okay.
I'm saying that right now.
I have no evidence of this, completely unsubstantiated.
You heard it here first.
If any A-list star is a hitman, it's Bill Shatner.
In his younger days, when he was a lumberjack.
He's just that classic Canadian stereotype of the lumberjack/slash.
Would you get handed burgers by like a serial killer?
No, but if like a serial killer and I knew it.
I think a lot of people would do it.
If Robert Durst was handing out burgers, people wouldn't.
People would go, but I don't think I would want to.
No.
I don't want a killer to look me in the eye ever because it's like, I don't know how they choose their victims.
Like, if they know my face, I might be dead in 10 years.
Secrets Behind the Bastards00:07:59
You know what I mean?
Like, I don't know.
Maybe one day they'll be like, I remember that face.
Oh, just randomly.
I'll just kill her.
You know what I mean?
I don't know.
Anyway, sorry for derailing.
Is Nellie from St. Louis?
What?
Is Nellie from St. Louis?
I have no idea.
Anyway, I think of other artists from St. Louis.
Where I landed is if, like, Bill Shatner was on trial for some terrible crime and he was on his way to court working at a McDonald's.
I would try to get some McNuggets from William Shatner.
You would.
I would.
I think I would.
So, yeah, that's your answer.
I can see why people would do this.
So, quite the digression.
On October 29th, 2004, a few days after Kelly's night at McDonald's Guy, R. Kelly stopped a performance in Madison Square Gardens saying a fan had waved a gun at him.
He wound up in a fight backstage with one of Jay-Z's people and got pepper sprayed.
He went to the hospital.
There were a shitload of lawsuits, and the tour collapsed in on itself.
So on July 21st, 2005, during pretrial proceedings in Kelly's court case, a 21-year-old woman testified that the girl in Kelly's sex tape was 14 when the video had been filmed, saying it, quote, it was the summer after eighth grade.
The judge did not consider...
Yeah, that's bad, right?
Eighth grade sounds so much younger than 14.
Yeah, 14 sounds, I mean, it's still bad, but eighth grade really drives it home what's going on here.
The judge did not consider this enough and threatened to toss out the court case unless a more affirmative ID could be made.
Two months after this, Robert's wife, Andrea, filed for an order of protection against her husband.
She claimed that she had asked him for a divorce and he'd hit her.
She rescinded the order shortly thereafter, but they wound up getting a divorce in 2008 anyway.
And we will hear from Andrea a little bit at the end of all this.
Back in February of 2006, while everybody was still waiting for the Kelly trial to start, Robert Kelly's brother, Carrie, or Killa Kelly, came out with a DVD filled with allegations against his sibling.
Among other things, yeah, Killa Kelly claims that R. Kelly offered him $50,000 in cash and a record deal to pretend to be the man on the tape.
He also alleged that his brother was abusive to his wife and had a problem with underage girls.
Aye aye.
None of that seems out of the pale.
I will say that the credibility of Killa Kelly's allegations is somewhat put into question by the way that he chose to drop this bombshell.
Number one.
It's in a mixtape.
A DVD is not the most credible way to present allegations.
What was there title page and like bonus features?
I couldn't find the title.
I found out it was published by Drama Magazine with an H in the word drama.
Drama.
So it's, again, I'm going to guess he got money for this.
The H came before the D, so it's like trauma.
Drama.
Yeah.
So maybe it was all a cynical cash grab.
That said, it is consistent with all the other allegations that have been made, and it wouldn't be the weirdest thing in the world if R. Kelly tried to have his brother take the fall for him.
Now, even under the cloud of legal fuckery looming over him, Robert Kelly had continued to release albums that continue to be gigantic hits.
And this is important to note, and part of why Kelly's fans defend him so vociferously.
R. Kelly has been the biggest name in RB throughout most of this.
In May 2007, R. Kelly gave an interview to Hip Hop Soul magazine.
In it, he said, I'm the Ollie of today.
I'm the Marvin Gaye of today.
I'm the Bob Marley of today.
I'm the Martin Luther King or all the other greats that have come before us.
And a lot of people are starting to realize that now.
In February of 2008, a couple months before jury selection began on the trial, Regina Daniels, Kelly's longtime spokeswoman and the person who'd officially denied the allegations of his wrongdoings to the press for like a decade, left his employees with her husband, George Daniels.
In the interview, George explained, He crossed the line with my daughter.
It didn't get to the extreme of that, the sex tape video, or else I wouldn't be here if you know what I'm talking about.
The reason that I'm talking about this, it's not just for me, it's not just for my wife, it's not just for my daughter, but it's for other fathers and mothers because it doesn't have to be a superstar.
It could be the dude on the corner.
There are guys who sit around and give your child a couple bucks to go to school and then wait until they get a little older, and then they set that trap.
That's grooming.
Yeah, yeah, there's grooming.
And this is now, again, the husband and his spokeswoman, both of whom had worked for him coming out and saying this.
A lot of people in his orbit have come out later with allegations.
On June 14th, 2008, R. Kelly was found not guilty by a jury of his peers.
The prosecution's star witness, the woman in the tape, never took the stand.
Jim DeRogatus, the Chicago Sun-Times reporter who broke the story, took the fifth and did not testify.
I think some of it is that he might have had to admit that he'd seen the tape, which would have been legally scary.
I think he also had some worries that he would be required to give up sources and stuff like that.
So he did not testify, which is always a fraught thing for a journalist in a court case.
There's a lot of reasons that would be complicated.
Four days later, Judge Gawn threw a post-trial party at a bar to celebrate the end of the case.
He invited the defense, the prosecution, court workers, and reporters.
One of those reporters.
Is that a thing that people do?
It happened this time.
Is that typical?
I've never heard of this before.
To like invite, like, hey, guys, like, rap party and the people who are just prosecution, defense.
Let's all get on.
Get down.
That's so bizarre.
That's really weird.
But one of the reporters who was present says that it was a hoot and that everyone there was loose and relaxed.
So that's nice.
Oh, you almost put me in jail.
Let's all party.
Let's all party.
I don't think R. Kelly went.
What?
I'm going to guess maybe that was the judge's hope that he'd get to party with R. Kelly.
Weird.
Again, there's some weirdness with the judge.
The judge threw it.
Yeah.
Some weirdness.
So R. Kelly was not guilty.
And if he were truly innocent of all of the allegations against him, this story might have ended there.
But this is not the sort of podcast where we talk about wrongly accused people.
So in the years since R. Kelly was declared not guilty, things have only gotten darker and a whole lot creepier.
All of that will be coming to you, the listener, on Thursday.
And we drop part two of the working title has been R. Kelly.
What the hell, man?
How are you doing?
I'm okay.
I didn't realize that you were going to leave me on a cliffhanger, though.
I'm going to leave you on a cliffhanger.
So I'm not going to know that.
That's when the air horn should have kicked in.
I don't like the defense that people say of like, oh, well, great artist, blah, blah, blah.
We hear it all the time, great artist.
You know, what are we going to do?
Not give their art?
Yeah, I think it would have helped public opinion if when someone's under trial for child pornography that they're forbidden to put out art because then people can just, you know, fine, appreciate the stuff that came before, but like, we don't need to continue liking the guy.
It might be true he's talented, but like, while you're under trial for something bad, you shouldn't be allowed to put out any more of your art.
That's a privilege.
That's not a right.
Well, I mean, when you're on trial, though, you're not guilty.
Like, you can't stop someone from putting out art when they're innocent until proven guilty.
But I think that, because then it puts people in a position where it's like, well, it's all good.
We should just listen to it.
Well, why don't we just stop having it?
Then we don't have to be like, it's so good in defending it.
I think there's, you have some water when you're trying to get people to be like, hey, this guy's been accused of a bunch of heinous crimes.
Let's all boycott his music.
I think that's fine.
But I think the government can't go and be like, you don't get to make music.
Yeah, you're right.
Because then when someone isn't guilty, it can be used against them to silence them.
But that's pesky civil rights issues.
I don't know, man.
I don't know.
Justice.
Woo.
Teresa, you want to plug your pluggables?
Yeah, sure.
I've got a podcast.
It's all about secrets.
I've got to get you on sometimes.
I love secrets.
You got any secrets?
I feel like you're a very open book, but it doesn't have to be a scandalous secret.
Just something you've not talked about, you know, on stage or whatever.
I already did podcasts about.
It's called You Can Tell Me Anything.
Comedians Confess Something They Haven't Told Anyone.
It's really fun.
You can find it on Instagram at TellMe AnythingPod.
Not Destroying the World00:03:15
And I'm on Twitter at Larissa T.
Yeah, I'll have to be on.
I'll talk about the time I firebomb that oil derrick or something.
I'm Robert Evans.
This has been Behind the Bastards.
You can find us on Instagram and Twitter at BastardsPod.
You can buy shirts and cups and cell phone cases and commercial drilling equipment all at our TeePublic store, Behind the Bastards, TeePublic.
Check it out.
You can get our branded stuff on your MX80 Earth Core Cracker, which is one of the finest commercial drilling rigs available.
I shouldn't be lying about commercial drilling equipment.
We're going to have like 30 people pop up on Twitter and be like, also, you can get stickers.
You can find me on Twitter at iWriteOK.
You can find the sources for this episode on behindthebastards.com.
We'll be back on Thursday with the story of R. Kelly's alleged sex cult.
And until then, podcasts!
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