Nobody has really heard from once mega-R&B star R. Kelly in awhile. It’s been nearly three years since the disgraced singer has been in prison serving a 30-year sentence in 2022 for racketeering and transporting minors across state lines for sexual activity.
Later that year, he was convicted of multiple child pornography and sex abuse charges. He was sentenced to 20 years in prison on those charges, but was told he could serve all but one year concurrently with his prior 30-year sentence.
In a documentary that aired last year, Kelly’s daughter, Buku Abi, accused the artist of sexually abusing her during her childhood.
But recently, R. Kelly recently broke his silence as podcasters April Smith and Patricia Dillard happened to land a phone interview with Kelly from prison.
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As TMZ.com reported, April and Patricia made the decision to post their interview with the convicted felon, which they did for their “Inmate Tea with A&P” podcast — and during their chat Patricia, in particular, was feeling it when Kelly started singing.
R. Kelly’s Singing is an ‘Incurable Disease’
During his interview with the podcast, the convicted sex criminal said that “singing is a beautiful disease that’s incurable.”
Kelly, 58, continued by saying he is “working on getting out and getting back to getting back to what it is God” gave him his talents for. He added that he is “using patience as a tactic.”
The podcasting duo told TMZ that they scored the Kelly interview totally by accident. They were interviewing a different inmate who mentioned Kelly was in the same prison, and he managed to get him on the line.
April and Patricia say they were comfortable going forward with the interview because they didn’t discuss his case at all — he’s under a gag rule while he appeals his conviction on multiple charges, including force labor, sexual exploitation of minor, and Mann Act violations.
As Patricia put it, “We’re just 2 individuals who are able to separate the art from the artist.”
They say they’ve had mixed responses to the podcast, which they expected, considering many people have considered Kelly fully canceled since his conviction — but still, they told us … “When R. Kelly calls, you answer.”
The podcasters point out, working on prison reform is why they launched their podcast, and normally they speak to non-famous inmates … mainly about prison conditions, and not details of their convictions.
R. Kelly Said He Suffers from a Generational Curse
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 convincted of sexual offenses against multiple underage girls, has a catalog of some of the most sexually explicit music, and one who once called 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 the 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.”
