Shumita Basu, Narrating: Hi there. A warning before we get started. Today's episode is about sexual abuse.
[MUSIC FADES IN]
Basu, Narrating: This is "In Conversation" from "Apple News." I'm Shumita Basu. Today, how R. Kelly got away with sexually abusing children for decades.
[MUSIC FADES OUT]
Basu, Narrating: Let's go back to the year 2000. It's the day before Thanksgiving. A journalist named Jim DeRogatis heads into the newsroom to take care of a few things before the holiday weekend.
[APPREHENSIVE MUSIC]
Jim DeRogatis: I only went to the office once a week to pick up my mail, file my expenses and get the hell out before they could tell me, "You know, Styx is playing at the Star Plaza casino. We haven't written about them in a long time."
Basu, Narrating: Jim was the long-time music critic for the "Chicago Sun-Times."
DeRogatis: Roger Ebert did movies. I did music.
Basu, Narrating: And when he got into the newsroom that day, there was a tip from a reader waiting for him.
DeRogatis: I got a fax, anonymously. That's how long ago. The technology was still faxes. And it said, "Dear, Mr. DeRogatis, you reviewed R. Kelly's newest album, and you compared him to Marvin Gaye. Marvin had his problems, but Robert's are different. Robert's problem is young girls."
Basu, Narrating: Robert is Robert Sylvester Kelly, R. Kelly. Jim thinks, "This is probably just some hate mail," and he goes home for the long weekend. But that fax, it kinda starts to gnaw at him.
DeRogatis: Because there was a level of specificity. There was mention of a lawsuit that had been filed, but never reported, by a 15-year-old girl. There was detail about the Aaliyah marriage. It said that there's a Chicago police investigation that had been active, at that point, for a year and a half, into Kelly having sexual contact with underage girls.
Basu, Narrating: So, he goes back to the office on Monday, and he calls up the Chicago PD sex crimes unit.
DeRogatis: I said, "I'm Jim DeRogatis, from the 'Chicago Sun-Times,' calling about your investigation into R. Kelly." And she said, "Oh, I was wondering how long it would be before someone asked me about that. I can't talk to you." And she hung up.
Basu, Narrating: That's when Jim DeRogatis knew he was onto something big.
Here's what we know about R. Kelly today, in part thanks to Jim's reporting. Kelly's been accused of sexually abusing minors starting in the early 1990s. That's around the time he married the pop star Aaliyah. She was 15 years old. R. Kelly was 27.
Dozens of victims have come forward over the years. Many say R. Kelly ran a sex cult, where he brainwashed, abused and isolated them. Earlier this summer, he was sentenced to 30 years in prison for racketeering and sex trafficking.
Jim's 20-plus years of reporting on this story is now the basis of the book "Soulless: The Case Against R. Kelly." I spoke with Jim about what it was like to stay on this story for so many years without seeing any real accountability. He picks up with what happened after he called Chicago police. His editor assigned a second reporter, named Abdon Pallasch, to the investigation.
[MUSIC FADES OUT]
DeRogatis: Abdon and I worked for six weeks or so, 18-hour days, ringing a lot of doorbells on the south and west sides. He was talking to cops and lawyers. I was talking to real people. [LAUGHS]
Basu: Real people, meaning victims?
DeRogatis: Victims, people in the music industry who'd witnessed behavior, people close to Kelly who had broken from him. Our story ran December 21st, 2000. Abdon and I waited for the presses to roll. And two in the morning, we had a beer and we said, "Okay, I think we got him. He's done." Because the things we reported in that lawsuit, a 15-year-old girl had been used by Kelly to arrange other illegal sexual contacts with other 14-, 15-, 16-year-old girls. We'd gotten court documents slipped to us, that had been sealed, that annulled the Aaliyah marriage, were shocked to read about physical violence, Kelly against Aaliyah. We'd found other victims. We thought he was done. And instead, it didn't seem to matter.
Basu, Narrating: The case that Jim and his colleague wrote about at the time involved a girl named Tiffany Hawkins. She was the first to pursue legal action against R. Kelly back in 1996. Her suit alleged that he initiated a sexual relationship with her when she was 15 and he was 24, and that he coerced her into having group sex with other underage girls.
Here's what Tiffany says about that experience in the Lifetime documentary series "Surviving R. Kelly."
[INTENSE MUSIC]
[START SURVIVING R. KELLY ARCHIVAL CLIP]
Tiffany Hawkins: I honestly cannot think of a time that I was with Robert and we didn't have sex. It was all the time, all the time. I mean, I hated it. I hate it. I hated it. But I did it because I felt like it's what I had to do.
[END SURVIVING R. KELLY ARCHIVAL CLIP]
[MUSIC FADES OUT]
Basu, Narrating: Tiffany was an aspiring singer. She was so talented that her choir teacher told her that she reminded her of Whitney Houston. And Jim says R. Kelly promised her a career.
DeRogatis: Tiffany was the lead backing singer, along with two teenage friends to Aaliyah, from the South Side of Chicago. She traveled the world and saw Amsterdam and London and Paris and Rome, singing behind her best friend. They were a posse. They called themselves "Second Chapter" because they were teenagers entering adulthood, the second chapter of their lives. And, you know, he had sexual contact with every one of those kids, including Aaliyah.
Basu, Narrating: Still, despite what felt like a bombshell news story, Jim says no one seemed to notice or care. Then came another huge anonymous tip. Someone mailed Jim a VHS tape that allegedly showed R. Kelly having sex with an underage girl. It was almost 27 minutes long.
DeRogatis: And now the tape was in my hands. And it's most horrifying thing I've ever seen. Twenty-six minutes and 39 seconds. Think about that, Shumita. This was a document of a rape. You know, she had the vacant, disembodied look of a zombie.
Basu: Disturbing. Really, truly disturbing. And it sounds like you were actually very quick to take that VHS and hand it over to the police.
DeRogatis: Yeah. Within a couple of hours, literally two hours, I was down at the "Sun-Times." But most importantly, handing the original to the cops who had now been investigating Kelly for several years. And it took several months. February the tape arrives. We write about it a week later as Kelly is singing "The World's Greatest" at the opening of the Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City.
[MELLOW MUSIC]
Basu, Narrating: This tape led to an indictment. Kelly was charged with 21 counts of child pornography in June of 2002.
But it would take six years for the case to go to trial. The jury deliberated for less than a day. And ultimately, Kelly was acquitted on all counts in 2008. The jury couldn't say with 100 percent confidence that the girl on the tape was a minor.
Jump ahead to 2017. That's when Jim's next big piece on R. Kelly comes out, in "BuzzFeed News." He writes, "R. Kelly was running a sex cult." Parents told Jim that it felt like their daughters were taken prisoner by Kelly, that he was controlling every aspect of their lives.
[MUSIC FADES OUT]
Basu, Narrating: Here's what Jerhonda Pace, a survivor, told "Surviving R. Kelly."
[INTENSE MUSIC]
[START SURVIVING R. KELLY ARCHIVAL CLIP]
Jerhonda Pace: I had to give him an update about everything. Like, if I was about to brush my teeth, I had to let Rob know. If I wanted to take a shower, he had to know. And then when guys came around, I had to put my head down or I had to turn and face the wall. When you disobey him, or you question him, that's considered breaking the rules.
[END SURVIVING R. KELLY ARCHIVAL CLIP]
[MUSIC FADES OUT]
Basu, Narrating: I asked Jim to explain how exactly R. Kelly's operation worked and how he was getting away with this for so long.
DeRogatis: Well, this is a man who generated, over the course of his career, a billion dollars for Jive Records and a half billion for himself. And as long as the gravy train was rolling, no one was gonna derail that gravy train. And R. Kelly got whatever he wanted, which included his henchman pressing little balled up pieces of paper with his cell phone number into the palms of the girls he singled out. And night after night, R. Kelly goes to that little girl in the corner with acne and braces, who's staring at her shoes, too shy to talk to anybody. That is his sickness.
Basu: So, let me ask you, Jim, knowing everything we know now - and maybe we will never fully know the scope of his predatory behavior - how many victims were you able to identify in your reporting?
DeRogatis: I know the names of 68.
Basu: Sixty-eight, you said?
DeRogatis: Sixty-eight. And there were several others I'd never talked to who have been named in the two federal indictments, who testified in Brooklyn or will testify in Chicago. There's several others in the Cook County indictment. I believe it's well over a hundred.
Shumita: Wow.
DeRogatis: For 30 years, since 1991 until the night he's arrested in front of his luxury apartment at Trump Tower, Chicago, in 2019, it's happening in the full glare of the brightest spotlight of world superstardom imaginable. And nobody stopped him for 30 years.
Basu: Jim, this is the obvious question, but it's also the most important question. Why do you think this happened? Why do you think that there wasn't all of this new scrutiny and all this new attention, especially when you and your partner started publishing these very explosive reports?
DeRogatis: I always defer to the women, Shumita, who did the bravest thing imaginable in, you know, ripping out their soul and trusting a fat, white rock critic to tell their story. And they say it was race. You know, "No one was going to believe me. I was a young, Black girl." I heard that so many times, and it always broke my heart. But I also think I understand how this music touched people. If "I Believe I Can Fly" played at your kid's kindergarten graduation, and "Step in the Name of Love" was your wedding song, and "Ignition Remix" powered every backyard barbecue with friends and family you ever went to, that music was yours as much as it was his. And, you know, it was a part of your life that you did not want to turn off. You know, and I heard this from many of the victims as well: "If it had been one white girl in Winnetka, wealthy Chicago, North Shore suburb, this would've been different." But he wisely chose young, Black victims, often from broken families.
DeRogatis: People want to talk about the parents failing those girls. It's not unlike the Catholic priest. They trust this person who's respected and beloved. You know, and then even after the acquittal, when this had been out there, parents said to me, "I'm a serious mom. He thought my daughter had talent. He was gonna help her be a star, like Aaliyah. I was gonna be at her side every moment. I was never gonna not be with her. And he was found innocent, but if there was anything, I was gonna be there." Well, you know, the predator, the sexual predator, the parish priest, the school bus driver, or Robert Sylvester Kelly are expert at separating their victims from their support systems, friends and family, and cutting them off. And you saw that behavior escalate.
Basu: So, what was it, in your opinion, that finally got people to pay attention to what was really happening with R. Kelly?
DeRogatis: Well, I give all credit to Dream Hampton, who was the showrunner on the first "Surviving R. Kelly." Everything that was good about that production was Dream, who is a brilliant journalist and documentarian from Detroit. This was an example, though, of reality TV having an impact. Because for two decades, I had sat with women, and that had been one-on-one. You know, the tears shed, the showing me the scars on their wrist, the hospital report from the overdose where they tried to kill themselves. And it's one thing to dismiss these women as hoes, liars and gold diggers in the abstract. You haven't met them. And then suddenly you're meeting those women, one by one by one, and they're in your living room, in the power of television, and their parents are you. You love your kids just as much.
Basu: Is that all it is? It's just the visual medium that makes it feel, you think, more relatable for people?
DeRogatis: I really do. "Surviving R. Kelly" could not have happened without my two decades of reporting, but the impact that meeting those women has was more powerful than my two decades of reporting. Now, people say it's a new era. The #MeToo era. You know, the "BuzzFeed" article is July 2017. October 2017, the Harvey Weinstein stories run in the "New York Times" and "The New Yorker," for which those three reporters got a Pulitzer. [LAUGHS] I don't have one of those yet.
Basu: You don't sound bitter at all, Jim.
DeRogatis: You know, that's not why I did it.
Basu: Sure, sure. Of course.
DeRogatis: And also, Black girls don't matter, right? Harvey Weinstein was abusing beautiful, white actresses. And you know, I don't think things have changed, Shumita, sad to say. Neither does Tarana Burke, who launched #MeToo a decade before it goes viral with Weinstein in 2017. You know, it is one step forward and two steps back. I mean, the conversation is being had, and that is good. It is only the entire history of humankind overdue, but we also ain't making that much progress.
Basu, Narrating: The case against R. Kelly did eventually make progress. In 2021, he was convicted of racketeering and sex trafficking. He's appealing that verdict. Earlier this summer, he was sentenced to 30 years in prison. R. Kelly is 55-years old, so that's potentially the rest of his life. I asked Jim whether the outcome felt like justice for the victims and their families.
DeRogatis: Well, the women who I was still in touch with were very, very glad to finally be heard and believed in a court of law after all of these years. But they also all said, every single one of them, it's too little too late. For them, the damage has been done.
Basu: I can't help but think about how, you know, the #MeToo era brought all of this new scrutiny and legal action and "believe women," right? That was in the air, "believe women." And it feels like something has changed in the past two years, three years, maybe. I'm thinking of some major things that we've seen. Bill Cosby, for example, was convicted on sexual assault charges, then that conviction was overturned. He's free today. I mean, is there any shot that Kelly might get this conviction overturned?
DeRogatis: No, no. I believe he's done and he's never gonna breathe clean air again. You know, we don't believe women. That's the problem. If you go to the FBI, which is hardly a liberal organization, you have to look at the federal statistics. Of the sexual assaults that happen, only 40 percent are ever brought to criminal proceedings. Only 40 percent of victims go to the cops. Of those 40 percent, about one and a half percent to one percent, depending on the study, turn out to be false accusations. It's not that there's this tidal wave of women falsely accusing men. It's just not true.
Basu, Narrating: On August 15th, the next federal trial for R. Kelly is scheduled to start in Chicago. He faces charges of child pornography and obstruction of justice. More victims have come forward. There's new evidence, including new videotapes. And one of the questions facing the jury is whether Kelly ran his network of abuse with the help of others, like a mob boss.
[INTRIGUING MUSIC]
DeRogatis: You know, New York won the racketeering case, but it was just Kelly. Chicago is trying this second video case and more racketeering, and they've got two members of the racket. One is a right-hand man who'd been by his side for decades, pretty much the entire ride. And the other was his accountant who was, for all intents and purposes, his managers for years, too. But still, those two guys are low level.
Basu, Narrating: Even if R. Kelly is convicted by a federal jury for a second time, Jim says that shouldn't be the end of the story.
DeRogatis: Every system we can name in Chicago, in America, failed those young, Black girls. That is why this story is important.
Basu, Narrating: He says there's a lot of blame to go around. From the cops who failed to investigate, the court system that didn't hold R. Kelly accountable sooner, the schools in Chicago that let him continue visiting, even though that's where he often met victims. And, of course, the music industry that kept this open secret for so long.
[MUSIC FADES OUT]
DeRogatis: Where is the responsibility? Dream and I, we've said, you know, Barry Weiss and Clive Calder, those heads of Jive Records, a billion dollars. That's where the money is. Where is the victim's restitution fund? Where is the culpability for this record company? Let's not forget, Jive was the biggest label in the world. Britney Spears, NSYNC, R. Kelly. So it's an entire industry.
DeRogatis: And I don't know what those companies should do. I don't know what any individual should do. We are left with this humongous philosophical question: Can we separate the art and the artist?
DeRogatis: No one in the history of popular music has ever been convicted of charges as broad and deep as Robert Kelly, no one. And men have been treating women badly in pop music since the era of the bobby soxers until last week. Nobody has ever been formally convicted. And people say to me, "Well, you know, Led Zeppelin." Where are the convictions? All right? Yeah, men are horrible to women in every field, including my beloved music world. Nobody. Nobody's ever been convicted of charges this deep.
[MUSIC FADES IN]
Basu, Narrating: You can read an excerpt from Jim DeRogatis' book, "Soulless: The Case Against R. Kelly," in "The Sunday Times" on Apple News. You can find a link on our show notes page. And if you or someone you know is being abused by their partner, you can call the National Domestic Violence Hotline for help at 1-800-799-SAFE, or text the word "START" to 88788.
[MUSIC FADES OUT]