The Struggle to Silence R. Kelly

Sustained public pressure is what will finally bring the singer down.
R. Kelly
R. Kelly. Photo by Noam Galai/Getty Images.

Four days before Thanksgiving 2013, in a spectacle that now seems a little too real, R. Kelly played the president on national TV. It was the American Music Awards, and he was performing “Do What U Want,” his libidinous duet with Lady Gaga, from inside a fake Oval Office. Gaga took the role of Kelly’s secretary, at times singing from between his legs. Less than a week earlier, the duo had performed the song on “Saturday Night Live,” where Kelly did pushups on top of her. But on New Year’s Day 2014, Gaga released an alternate version of her Artpop hit: Christina Aguilera was in, and Kelly was nowhere to be found.

What had changed in between was an extensive airing of the myriad allegations of sexual misconduct against Kelly, often involving underage girls. In a December 16, 2013 interview with Jessica Hopper in the Village Voice, longtime Chicago music journalist Jim DeRogatis described “dozens of girls—not one, not two, dozens—with harrowing” allegations against Kelly. “We’re talking about predatory behavior,” said DeRogatis, who first exposed the accusations against Kelly more than a decade earlier, in the Chicago Sun-Times. “Their lives were ruined.”

Kelly emerged relatively unscathed from the rekindling of these claims. After “Do What U Want,” he appeared on tracks with Justin Bieber, Chance the Rapper, and Jennifer Hudson, and he secured Lil Wayne, Ty Dolla $ign, Jeremih, Jhené Aiko, and Tinashe as guests on his 2015 album, The Buffet. Given that similar allegations against Kelly have swirled throughout almost his entire 25-year reign as the self-proclaimed “King of R&B,” this was probably no surprise. (He has always denied any wrongdoing.) But as public consciousness evolves in light of the Weinstein effect and the #MeToo movement, and Kelly’s lucrative heyday recedes further into the rearview, it’s looking as if his days of impunity are numbered.

New allegations of sexual misconduct by Kelly have dominated headlines over the last 10 months. In July of 2017, DeRogatis reported for BuzzFeed News that two sets of parents claimed Kelly was holding their daughters, ages 19 and 18, at homes in the Atlanta area, while “three former members of Kelly’s inner circle” said Kelly controlled every move of the women living in his homes. According to a police report viewed by Pitchfork, one of the parents said Kelly was running a “cult.” In the months that followed, multiple women came out with their own stories about Kelly: One of them allegedly had sex with him when she was underage and he paid for her silence; another claimed he kicked and slapped her, forced her to have oral sex with other women, and required her to contact Kelly or his staff before doing just about anything—including using the bathroom—during a two-year relationship that began in 2011. Lately we’ve been experiencing another wave of accusations, which started last month when the Dallas Morning News reported that an anonymous Texas woman told police that Kelly gave her a sexually transmitted disease—undisclosed, even intentionally.

Early this month, four separate but not dissimilar sets of allegations involving Kelly came into focus. DeRogatis shared two in another BuzzFeed investigation. One woman detailed an alleged relationship with Kelly, beginning at age 17, that included him having sex with her when she was underage, hitting her on several occasions, and “pressuring her to engage in sexual acts against her will.” Meanwhile, a mother claimed that Kelly has been keeping her from speaking to her 27-year-old daughter, who also started a relationship with Kelly when she was 17, for the past three months. The Washington Post added more allegations to the pile, from two women who, DeRogatis has said, previously settled lawsuits with Kelly over claims of underage sex. And on “Megyn Kelly TODAY,” two of the women from the original 2017 BuzzFeed story reiterated their horrific accounts of living with the R&B singer.

Kelly probably won’t face charges anytime soon. His first and only criminal trial—for child pornography charges, after DeRogatis obtained a video that appeared to show Kelly urinating on a girl who was allegedly 14 years old—dragged on for six years, thanks to countless motions from his legal team. Kelly was ultimately acquitted in 2008, reportedly because the jury remained unconvinced about the identity and age of the girl in the video. Prosecutors are likely leery of repeating another marathon trial, as Susan Loggans, a lawyer who has gotten settlements for at least three women who said Kelly abused them, told the New York Times.

In Atlanta, a spokesperson for the Fulton County District Attorney’s office told Pitchfork it “does not have an active investigation into Mr. Kelly at this time.” Dallas police have said they aren’t investigating the STD allegations as sexual assault because there are no allegations that the sex was non-consensual. Giving someone an STD without telling them can still count as just plain assault in Texas, but a police spokesperson told Pitchfork, “We do not have any new updates to release in this case.”

Kelly might not be about to face a Bill Cosby–style courtroom reckoning, but public pressure has started to hit him in the pocketbook. Several of Kelly’s shows have been canceled over the past year, including one scheduled for May 5 in his hometown of Chicago, while others have been hit with protests. Earlier this month, Spotify announced that it had pulled his music from its playlists (but not its on-demand catalog), prompting an industry-wide debate over streaming services’ role in censoring artists of “hateful conduct.” Apple Music and Pandora have stopped promoting Kelly’s music as well, albeit more quietly.

The turning tide can be traced back to the #MuteRKelly protest campaign, launched by Atlanta activists Oronike Odeleye and Kenyette Barnes last summer and co-signed by the Women of Color of Time’s Up last month. Ava DuVernay, Lupita Nyong’o, Viola Davis, Shonda Rhimes, and more called for Kelly’s business associates to cut ties, including his longtime label home, RCA Records. While RCA hasn’t responded to requests for comment, its silence doesn’t necessarily mean Kelly will stay signed for good. As one veteran music-business attorney suggested to Variety, the label could be quietly waiting for Kelly’s contract to lapse. But as the convoluted courtroom drama and massive social media campaign surrounding the Dr. Luke-Kesha case showed, it takes an extraordinary amount of public backlash for a major label to rearrange the complex contracts they typically have in place with longtime superstars. Which is to say, concerned music fans should continue to speak up if they want to see results.

Rejection of Kelly’s music has been a path less taken over the years, for a few reasons. Between the inescapable rise of “Ignition (Remix)” in the early ’00s and the winking appeal of the “Trapped in the Closet” series at the end of the decade, an entire generation of mainstream music fans grew up listening to R. Kelly either because they didn’t grasp the scope of the allegations or they discounted them due to his acquittal. (During this period, R. Kelly headlined the Pitchfork Music Festival. Pitchfork recently issued a statement saying, “It was wrong to book R. Kelly to perform at our festival in 2013 and we regret doing so.”) Also worth considering is Kelly’s choice of victims, which DeRogatis has suggested inspires apathy. “Nobody matters less to our society than young black women,” he said in 2013. Then there’s the fact that Kelly has been a soundtrack for Black America throughout the last three decades. As Shanita Hubbard poignantly wrote in the Times last December, “We’ve seen the unchecked power of white men ravish our communities, and we carry the message of ‘not right now’ when it comes to addressing our pain if the offender is black.” All of these factors have complicated the public consciousness surrounding R. Kelly’s behavior.

For his part, Kelly continues to defend his innocence adamantly. His team compared the open letter from Time’s Up to “a public lynching.” He told TMZ the idea he is holding women hostage is a ploy for money. In a statement to the Washington Post, Kelly’s management maintained that he “has close friendships with a number of women who are strong, independent, happy, well cared for, and free to come and go as they please. All of the women targeted by the current media onslaught are legal adults of sound mind and body, with their own free will.” But the public has a mind of its own, too, and it’s changing quickly on issues surrounding sexual misconduct and abuse. For R. Kelly to topple, though, the people will have to demand it.