…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.”