Waiting to Testify at R. Kelly’s Trial

Lizzette Martinez was seventeen when she first met R. Kelly. It was the winter of 1995, and Martinez, a cheerleader at North Miami Beach Senior High School, was at Aventura Mall with her childhood best friend, Michella Powery. At the time, Kelly was twenty-eight and one of the biggest R. & B. stars in the world. He lived in Chicago, but he was in Florida for the season, escaping the cold and working on new music at a local recording studio. “I said to my friend, ‘Oh, that’s R. Kelly,’ ” Martinez recalled, when I first interviewed her, in 2018. “I guess he overheard me, and he came over and gave me a hug, and I was kind of stunned. Then he walked away, and his bodyguard gave me his phone number.” It had been scrawled on a tiny, balled-up piece of paper, she said.

At the federal courthouse in Brooklyn, where Kelly is currently being tried for racketeering and sex trafficking, the jury has heard similar stories about slips of paper with Kelly’s phone number on them. Tom Arnold and Anthony Navarro, both of whom had worked under Kelly, testified to handing the slips out at concerts or wherever Kelly told them to. Two women, testifying anonymously, told the court that they had received such slips of paper. They also alleged that Kelly had sexual contact with them when they were seventeen—one in 1999, after she met the singer at the Rock ’N’ Roll McDonald’s, in Chicago, and the other in 2015, after she saw him at a concert in Orlando (though she lied about her age to Kelly). Those two women, along with three others, are at the heart of the racketeering charges brought against Kelly by the Eastern District of New York. Kelly has also been charged with the sexual exploitation of a child, bribery, kidnapping, forced labor, and a violation of the Mann Act. (He has pleaded not guilty and denied the charges against him.)

But the prosecution is not done making its case. There are an additional fifteen women and two men who are anonymously cited in the indictment, in order to bolster the government’s claim that Kelly displayed a pattern of predatory behavior. The majority of these additional victims have not yet testified; several have taken the stand, but it is unclear how many more will be called upon to do so. Federal prosecutors have not released a witness list, and have declined to comment about witnesses still to come.

Lizzette Martinez, who has yet to testify, is one of the additional victims. She is referred to by the Eastern District of New York as Jane Doe No. 9. The names on the list of remaining witnesses are just as much a secret to her as they are to the general public; although the prosecution is expected to start wrapping up its case sometime next week, Martinez still doesn’t know if she will end up being called to the witness stand. The uncertainty is taking a toll. At age forty-four, she is chain-smoking cigarettes, even though she never smoked previously. “I get that they have their ways of doing things, but it’s frustrating,” she said, of the prosecutors. “You may or may not have to uproot your life, go to Brooklyn, and sit across from him in a courtroom.”

The other day, Martinez told me, “I wish I never walked into that mall.” After meeting Kelly there, she claims that she and Powery ate dinner with him, his bodyguard, and his manager at the time, Barry Hankerson, at an Outback Steakhouse. “Barry kept looking at me,” Martinez recalled, in 2018. “It’s like he felt bad, you know, like he wanted to help me.” Roughly half a year earlier, Kelly had illegally wed Hankerson’s fifteen-year-old niece, Aaliyah, after producing her wildly successful début R. & B. album.

Back then, Martinez was an aspiring singer—she was part of an amateur vocal trio—and Kelly, a renowned songwriter and producer who consistently crafted hits for himself and for other artists, allegedly promised to help her with her musical career. But, as another aspiring singer who claims to have been victimized by Kelly testified, he never did. Not long after the dinner, Martinez says that she lost her virginity to Kelly, even though she told him that she was seventeen. (The age of consent in Florida is eighteen.) She said that their relationship continued until early 1999, despite Kelly hitting her on five occasions and pressuring her to engage in some sexual acts against her will. In 1996, she claims to have become pregnant with his child, and, one night, while waiting for Kelly to meet her in a Chicago hotel room, she miscarried. She told me that she tried calling Kelly but was unable to reach him, and went through the experience alone. “I guess it was for the best,” she said. A devout Catholic, she “didn’t want to go through that abortion.”

In the indictment, Martinez’s experiences are reduced to four sentences of dry legalese: “In or about 1995, Kelly met Jane Doe No. 9, a 17-year-old girl and an individual whose identity is known to the government, at a Florida mall and thereafter commenced a sexual relationship with her, in violation of Florida law. On one occasion, Jane Doe No. 9 laughed at a joke by one of Kelly’s associates and Kelly immediately summoned her outside and slapped her across the face for having done so. During their relationship, Jane Doe No. 9 contracted herpes and disclosed her diagnosis to Kelly, who did not admit to having herpes. At the time of her diagnosis, Jane Doe No. 9 was only sexually active with Kelly.” She is cited five more times in the document, in reference to “Kelly’s sexual abuse of minors,” “Kelly’s knowledge that he had herpes, an incurable sexually transmitted disease,” and Kelly’s “common schemes to recruit his victims.”

I first learned of Martinez in 2000, when I began reporting on rumors that R. Kelly sexually abused young girls. Two sources mentioned her to me, without specifying her name, as “the girl from Miami.” It wasn’t until 2018 that I finally heard the specifics of her story, when she spoke with me about it—and for the first time publicly—for a BuzzFeed News article. Martinez said that she had decided to come forward after reading an earlier piece I’d written about Kelly abusing a “sex cult” of six women. Two sets of parents were quoted in the article, saying that they desperately wanted to bring their daughters home. As a mother of twins, a boy and a girl who were in their late teens at the time of the BuzzFeed piece, Martinez couldn’t help but imagine her daughter in that same situation. “I saw it like my daughter, because if she had been walking in the mall—she’s just his type,” Martinez told me. “She would have been a victim.” (Recently, one of the women whose stories prompted Martinez to go public—a member of the so-called cult—testified at Kelly’s trial, as Jane Doe No. 5. Like Martinez, her sexual contact with Kelly began in Florida, when she was seventeen, but their experiences are two decades apart.)

Martinez said that taking her story public has not been a positive experience. After speaking to BuzzFeed, she participated in the TV documentary “Surviving R. Kelly,” which features interviews with many of the singer’s alleged victims, along with some of their family members, in the course of two seasons. To this day, Martinez continues to endure hateful posts on social media from some of Kelly’s fans. She is also unhappy with the documentary itself, which she believes turns trauma into entertainment. “It becomes like a soap opera, when it’s actually someone’s real life,” she told me. She described how she and the other victims were treated like celebrities in the aftermath of the film’s release. “There were so many awards shows and all these accolades, and I just thought it was obnoxious and ridiculous. Why would we walk a red carpet? I’m not an actress. I’m just a person who’s telling you something horrible that happened to me years ago. I am reliving it, and I don’t feel like going to an award show.”

There are a couple benefits to having participated in “Surviving R. Kelly.” One is that Martinez is still in touch with many of the other participants and their parents, who have become something of a support system. In particular, she has become close with the mother of the woman known as Jane Doe No. 6. “She deals with my up-and-down shit, and I have to thank her, because it’s really hard to deal with me right now,” Martinez said. The documentary also spurred movement in Kelly’s case: not long after the first six episodes aired, in January, 2019, Martinez heard from federal investigators, through her attorney. She was asked to tell her story again, in New York, to a room of roughly six people. When I asked who was in the room, she said, “I know that someone from Homeland Security was there.” (Kelly’s alleged violations of the Mann Act, which prohibits transporting people across state lines for prostitution or sexual purposes, falls under the Department of Homeland Security’s domain.)

Martinez never heard from the investigators again. But when the Eastern District of New York released its list of twenty-two Jane and Joe Does, in July, she appeared as Jane Doe No. 9. She still has not spoken with prosecutors, even though she could ostensibly be called to testify soon. “It’s caused me severe anxiety, and it’s getting worse because, every day, I don’t know what’s going to happen,” she told me.

Steven Berkowitz, a professor at the University of Colorado and an expert on the trauma endured by victims of sexual assault, said that it is “not uncommon” in such cases for victims to be in limbo, unaware of whether they will be asked to testify. “It really does depend on the jurisdiction,” he said, “and there are certainly places that do it better.” He added that all of Kelly’s alleged victims, regardless of whether they are facing the prospect of testifying, are likely experiencing similar emotional difficulties to Martinez’s. “Trials for any victim are triggering,” he said. It’s even worse when the trial is a major news story. “We see a resurgence of post-traumatic-stress symptoms, if they’ve ever been managed, and mood disorders, anxiety, and so forth are common,” he said. “We need to do a better job of supporting the victims, and our court systems generally don’t.”

Kelly’s trial may be high-profile, but it is also not televised. Martinez follows along via news reports, which she usually watches on the Black News Channel, or by getting updates from others who participated in the documentary. Often, the updates are upsetting, and fill her with dread at the prospect of testifying, although she is committed to appearing on the witness stand if she is ultimately asked to do so. It can sometimes be difficult to see how her testimony will help. “I’m going to face him, and then it’s, like, for what, to get myself more sick? To get more depressed?” she said.

But, at another point in the trial, Martinez texted me after reading about the testimony of Jane Doe No. 4, who said that Kelly began sexual contact with her in 2009, when she was sixteen and he was in his forties. (Roughly a year earlier, Kelly had been facing child-pornography charges, and the witness, then a high schooler, described cutting class in order to sit in on his trial.) During cross-examination, Deveraux Cannick, one of Kelly’s defense attorneys, asked, “You were, in fact, stalking him, weren’t you?” Such treatment enraged Martinez. She wasn’t just angry at Kelly’s lawyers, of course—she was angry at Kelly. “Quite frankly, I’m very angry at him, and I’m even angrier at the people who didn’t do anything to stop him,” she said.

“I’m now ready to get on the stand,” she told me. “Let’s go.”