Robert Kelly, best known as R. Kelly, has an undeniable list of hit songs, platinum records, and music awards. He also has had a dark cloud following him due to his interaction with younger-aged women.
Kelly's sex trafficking trial started on August 19th, 2021. Kelly has been accused of holding underage girls hostage in a sex ring. Some say Kelly is not guilty and want him free, yet scores of others want him to spend the rest of his life behind bars. No matter how you feel about R. Kelly, he still seems to surround himself with young women. Why is that?
In 2018 "I Admit It" where he revealed his truth on a lot of what people were talking about (see video below):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oR9lJfYTI-g
You May Also Like
Beginning line after line with "I admit ..." the singer confesses to a multitude of acts, including infidelity, sleeping with his girlfriend's best friend, having sexual relationships with fans and going to strip clubs every week.
"I admit I was in my own way," he sings.
In the song, Kelly admits to being involved with "both older and young ladies," but then asks, "But tell me how they call it pedophile because that s--- is crazy."
The singer dismisses claims that he "brainwashed" or "kidnapped" women as "silly" and accuses a father of dropping his daughter off at the concert where she and the singer met.
You May Also Like
His advice to parents: "Don't push your daughter in my face and tell me that it's okay."
"Now I don't know what else to say except, I'm so falsely accused. Tell me how can you judge when you've never walked in my shoes," he sings. You may have your opinions, entitled to your opinions ... but really am I supposed to go to jail or lose my career because of your opinion? Yeah, go ahead and stone me, point your finger at me, turn the world against me, but only God can mute me."
In the trial that started today, Kelly admitted...
...to nothing but an accuser shared a revealing testimony.
Jerhonda Johnson Pace, the first witness testifying for prosecutors in Kelly’s long-delayed trial claims she first met him when she was a 14-year-old fan outside one of his previous sexual misconduct trials. She also stated that she first had sex with him shortly after she turned 16. He would repeatedly choke her and spit on her and told her to dress like a Girl Scout.
In one of the most revealing interviews ever in GQ, Kelly shared where his warped behavior might come from. The R&B superstar R. Kelly peeled back the curtain and delivered a detailed, and sometimes disturbing, account of his journey to stardom, his setbacks, and where he's headed in the future.
In the interview, he confirms excerpts from his 2013 book, Soulacoaster: The Diary of Me, where he describes a number of premature sexual experiences, including an approach by a trusted family friend, a man, who he says tried to persuade Kelly to masturbate him for money, which Kelly says he rebuffed. “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.”
He then describes the full-blown sexual abuse that lasted for several years, from age seven until Kelly was nearly 15. It was at the hands of, as Kelly describes, a female family member. It started one day when Kelly fell asleep in front of the TV and was awakened from “a crazy dream about Three's Company” to find a woman playing with him:
"I tried to push her away, but she wouldn't stop until she was finished. When she was, she said, “You better not say shit to no one or else you gonna get a terrible whupping.”
“I remember it feeling weird," Kelly recounts. "I remember feeling ashamed. I remember closing my eyes or keeping my hands over my eyes. I remember those things, but couldn't judge it one way or the other fully. Over time, I remember actually, after a couple of years, looking forward to it sometimes. You know, acting like I didn't, but did.”
"It became a regular thing. Every other day, every other week.”
According to sexual abuse watchdog organizations, no two sexual predators think and act alike. Sexual perpetrators may be motivated by:
- A sense of excitement and satisfaction in grooming and manipulating not only the child they're abusing, but even in deceiving the parents and community at large.
- Low self-esteem, stress, or unmet emotional needs for intimacy & affection and use sexual gratification with a child as a means of coping with it. They may acknowledge that their behavior is wrong, and may even stop if the child resists, but if the abuse continues they may rationalize their behavior and minimize the abusive nature of their actions.
- An unchecked sense of entitlement - that they are above others and have a "right" to do what they want without reproach and seek to dominate others.
- Sexual deviancy - a desire to explore a variety of sexual experiences and may exhibit an addiction to sex & pornography.
- Social Isolation - some offenders are considered eccentric, awkward loners, that don't socialize well with others and may exhibit what many would consider abnormal behavior. Such offenders may choose to sexually abuse children because they are less-threatening than their peers.
"It teaches you to definitely be sexual earlier than you should have, than you're supposed to," admits Kelly. "You know, no different than putting a loaded gun in a kid's hand—he gonna grow up being a shooter, probably. I think it affects you tremendously when that happens at an early age. To be more hornier. Your hormones are up more than they would normally be. Mine was.”
When asked if he forgives his abuser, R. Kelly says:
“I, well, definitely forgive them. As I'm older, I look at it and I know that it had to be not just about me and them, but them and somebody older than them when they were younger, and whatever happened to them when they were younger. I looked at it as if there was a sort of like, I don't know, a generational curse, so to speak, going down through the family. Not just started with her doing that to me.”
Kelly is a man who has been accused of sexual offenses against multiple underage girls, has a catalog of some of the most sexually explicit music, and one who calls himself "the Pied Piper of R&B" (the original children's story of the fictional Pied Piper would use music to lure children out of their homes into a cave never to be seen again). He explains that he believes the sexual abuse he suffered is something that is passed down from generation to generation, so that in each new generation, the victim becomes perpetrator.
“Well, you know, just like poverty—poverty was a generational curse in my family, too, but I decided that I'm gonna stop that curse. I'm not gonna be broke, like my mom was broke, my uncles were broke, my sisters didn't have money, my cousins on down. Generational curse doesn't mean that the curse can't be broken. Just like having no father, that's a generational curse. Which is why, when my kids were born, I was Bill Cosby in the house. You know, the good one. You know, let's be clear there: how we saw Bill Cosby when we were coming up.”
According to the National Sex Offender directory, over 30% of those who are sexually abused have been done so by a family member. Many times that same family was also abused. It can be a vicious cycle.
Licensed counselor and founding editor of the Journal of Black Sexuality and Relationships (University of Nebraska Press) Dr. James Wadley tells BlackDoctor.org, "In cases of abuse, abandonment, and neglect sometimes people are more likely to accept or negotiate relationships that become re-enactments of the trauma that they endured as children. Dysfunctional relationships seemingly become functional based upon the familiarity of what some people experience during childhood. Some people are unable to successfully handle relational stability because they are or have continued to struggle with being gravely hurt (e.g., physically, emotionally, sexually, spiritually) as children."
When asked about what it takes to break the cycle, Kellz simply says, "Well, it's really not about breaking it. There's things that you don't want to do that you're not gonna do. It was just as simple as that. I want to be able to be a father to my kids, where I've never seen my father, but my kids can see me whenever they want, so that was broken [He and his wife Andrea divorced in 2009]. The poverty part was broken. And I feel the child-molestation part, that definitely was broken. But of course you gonna be misunderstood because you R. Kelly, and the success and things get mixed up in the music, and people take the words you sing in your songs and try to pound that on your head and say, ‘Ahh! You did do it—look what you just wrote over here.’”
"As I'm older, I've only learned to forgive it. Was it wrong? Absolutely. But it's a family member that I love so I would definitely say no to that one. To be honest, even if my mom, I saw her kill somebody, I'm not gonna say, ‘Well, yeah, she definitely should go to jail.’ It's just something I wouldn't do.”
When it comes to his past legal battles and rumors about him continuing the abuse with underage girls, he denies it all.
“I think, man, abso-effing-lutely I've been treated unfair. Yes. I'm not, you know, this innocent guy with a halo over his head. No, I love women. Do I like to sleep with underage girls? Absolutely not. I've said it a million times. But do I have people trying to destroy my career? Absolutely.”
Mayo Clinic describes some signs of abuse as withdrawal from friends and family, which may explain why Kelly admits that he sleeps in his closet at home.
“I sleep well when it's just pitch-black…. Once I get in that closet I feel like no one in the world has any idea that I am in this closet right now. And that gives me a peace of mind. I leave my phones outside of the closet, and once I get in that closet I feel like no one in the world has any idea that I am in this closet right now. And that gives me a peace of mind, to know that no one knows where I'm at right now. ‘I bet you they can't find me here.’ So it's that kind of thought.”
"I've got the front door locked, I got the back door locked, I got the room door locked, and I got the closet door locked. I'm in a door in a door in a door in a door, so I feel protected."
Dr. Wadley sums it up like this, "What we can learn from R. Kelly is that childhood abuse/sexual trauma needs to be discussed because it happens in all of our families. The people, couples, and families who are able to successfully talk about it in a constructive manner are typically able to move beyond the hurt. No child or person should ever have to endure being sexually coerced or manipulated and it is important that they are offered patience, understanding, empathy, and prayers so that they can heal in a meaningful way. Moreover, those who perpetrate these debilitative acts should also receive support as oftentimes, they are only re-enacting what was done to them as children."
For more on your favorite celebrity, click here.
