R Kelly Convicted: Everyone knew the allegations – so why did it take 30 years to get justice? | Ents & Arts News

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R Kelly’s trial was the culmination of decades of accusations, revealing a predator hidden in plain sight.

Rumors and allegations about the now disgraced R&B singer date back almost to the start of his career – and yet he has become a chart top, a Grammy winner, an artist who has filled arenas and collaborated with d ‘huge stars; at its height, one of the largest recording groups in the world.

The criminal details of his marriage to Aaliyah in 1994, when he was 15 and he was 27 – now detailed in open court, a former tour manager admitting to bribing an official to obtain fake ID to have the ceremony unfolds – had always been a well-known secret. And in 2002, Kelly was charged with 21 counts of making indecent pictures of children. After years of delay in his trial, the singer was acquitted, but the allegations never went away.

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R Kelly ‘will appeal’ sexual abuse charges

Claims made over the years have been silenced and swept aside by an industry that wanted the money to keep rolling and fans who didn’t want to believe Kelly could have committed the crimes he was accused of. The world wanted to hear his music, so his unknown accusers were easy to ignore.

In the end, it was a documentary series, Surviving R Kelly, released in 2019, that became the catalyst for the singer’s New York trial, and ultimately led to him being convicted of all nine counts. against him – one count of racketeering and eight counts of violating a law that prohibits the transport of people across state borders for the purpose of prostitution.

For Jim DeRogatis, a journalist and music critic who wrote his first investigative report on Kelly for the Chicago Sun-Times in December 2000, with details of an allegation against the singer dating back to 1991, it took a long time to to come.

“I always felt like I was late in history when my Sun-Times partner Abdon Pallasch and I did the first investigative report,” he told Sky News . “It had been going on for nine years already. We never thought when this document came out… that it would still be ongoing in 2021.”

A little over a year later, DeRogatis anonymously received a videotape. “There was a manila envelope with a VHS tape,” he says. “No marking either.” The contents of the tape, he said, were horrible. “Twenty-six minutes and 39 seconds made it very clear that Kelly had had sexual contact with a 14-year-old girl, urinating into her mouth at one point.”

The gang led to the 2002 charges and the postponement of the trial in 2008. But Kelly was acquitted and continued to prey on the young girls.

“He thought he was untouchable,” DeRogatis says. “There was a pride, an ego there … He silenced the victims with money.” The most shocking thing about the case, he says, is the delay and how Kelly was allowed to get away with what he was doing because of his fame.

Image: R Kelly was once one of the biggest music stars in the world

“During this time, he sells 100 million albums – his own, and [records and songs] he’s produced for everyone from Whitney Houston and Celine Dion to Lady Gaga and Justin Bieber. It was a slot machine for the music industry which was well aware of its behavior and never took any real action to stop it. “

DeRogatis has never stopped reporting, helping to tell the stories of 48 different accusers over the past 21 years. But it was Surviving R Kelly that finally got people listening, he says.

“There were cops who valiantly tried to stop his predatory behavior. But, you know, until Surviving R Kelly brought these women into people’s living rooms in America, and they saw woman after woman; 12 different women have appeared on camera, telling their stories, not all of them can be liars.

So why has justice taken so long?

Kenyette Tisha Barnes, the co-founder of the #MuteRKelly movement – launched in 2017 to call for a boycott of the singer’s music and performances, and “hold accountable those who have allowed this behavior to continue for so long” – says the answer is simple: “Because they were black girls from downtown Chicago.”

It took moves like #MeToo and Time’s Up, as well as #MuteRKelly, to get there, she says.

“I was a huge R Kelly fan many years ago in the 90s. And I remember the stories. I started hearing about Aaliyah and the other young girls, and it always was of young black girls.

“I was a black girl, I am a black woman in this country. And I watched the way the entertainment industry, our whole community, decried these young women for years. And enough was it. just enough.”

Image: R Kelly also faces sexual abuse charges in Illinois and Minnesota – to which he has also pleaded not guilty

DeRogatis agrees it was a ‘race issue’, saying: ‘What the 48 women I have told stories about over the past 21 years have all told me is that no one ‘is less important in America than young black girls. They just aren’t believed, and women in general aren’t believed about a history of sexual abuse. But black girls in particular. “

For Kelly, who last released a studio album in 2016, the guilty verdict in New York City isn’t the end of his legal woes; he faces other sexual abuse charges in Illinois and Minnesota – to which he has also pleaded not guilty.

So, if the trials continue, there could be more allegations against the singer to come. And thanks to this first test in New York, the spotlight is now also resolutely turned on those who, at best, have closed their eyes; at worst, allowed him.

Accusing the singer of racketeering meant that prosecutors set out to portray him as the head of “a company” where “managers, bodyguards, drivers, personal assistants and runners” were all complicit in recruiting women and girls for. sex with him.

DeRogatis says there are others who should be charged and Barnes agrees that even though Kelly was “at the top of the pyramid,” there is still “a lot of blame to blame.”

“Number one is R Kelly,” she said. “Number two, it’s the people who made it happen. It’s the producers, promoters, runners, people on his side who were more interested in lining up with a superstar than actually protecting black girls.

“And then we go further: it’s the black community. We are all accomplices. If you’ve ever played an R Kelly song, you are an accomplice. If you’ve ever watched this videotape, you are an accomplice. I think so. we have to unbox this reality that we have all allowed this man to move in the most predatory way. “

“Racketeering is generally used against Mafia bosses and drug lords,” DeRogatis explains. “We only have one person charged. How are you a criminal enterprise if no one else in your alleged enterprise is held responsible? “

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