Kelly had a deep, close relationship with his mother, but he says even she never knew everything that was going on in her young son's turbulent life. He says that until he mentioned it in his 2012 memoir,
Soulacoaster, he had never told anyone at all about the sexual abuse that he experienced. (Not even his ex-wife Andrea? “Absolutely not.”) It was something he “put so far in the back of my mind that I even forgot about it.” This wasn't the history he wanted for the person he was becoming: “As I got older, the more I just didn't want it to be in my past. The more I became successful.” He was determined that the R. Kelly the world would know—the one who would sell more than 30 million albums, have 36 Billboard Hot 100 hits, invent his own strange musical language, write hits for countless others, and conceive one of the weirdest syntheses of video and music of all time,
Trapped in the Closet—would be someone else. “I didn't want that to be something that was in my luggage once I got to my success home, so to speak.”
In the book, 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,” he tells me. “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.” But he describes in his memoir how the full-on sexual abuse that lasted for several years (it was oral sex the first time, though he tells me it soon became intercourse) started one day when Kelly fell asleep in front of the TV and was awoken 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, ʽYou better not say shyt to no one or else you gonna get a terrible whupping.ʼ”
The book says nothing about how this woman was connected to Kelly, other than implying that she was a regular presence in their home, but while we talk he refers to her as a relative. He doesn't say this as though he expects it to be any kind of revelation to me, more as though he assumes I already know it. I wonder if he even realizes she wasn't described like that in the book.
“At first, I couldn't judge it,” he says to me, when I ask him if he realized at the time that a really bad thing was happening. “I remember it feeling weird. 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.”
And did that change over time?
“Over time, yeah. I remember actually, after a couple of years, looking forward to it sometimes. You know, acting like I didn't, but did.”
How often would the abuse happen?
“Oh wow. It became a regular thing. Every other day, every other week.”
How many years did it go on for?
“As far as I can remember, about [age] 7 or 8 to maybe 14, 15. Something like that.”
Did anything in particular make it stop?
“When I started having a girlfriend, I felt really bad about it. Then I started getting older and knowing that's just not supposed to happen—family members. And I think it started getting scary for them because I just started acting really different about it, and I think it became a turnoff to them, and a scary thing.”
Was the person doing this still around in your life?
“Absolutely. But eventually they stopped being around me.”
Are they still around now?
“No, I haven't seen them in so long.”
Did you ever have a discussion with them about it?
“Tried to, but.”
How long ago was that?
“Maybe eight, nine years ago. Didn't want to talk about it. Didn't own up to it. Told me, ‘Sometime when you're kids, you think you've been through something, or did something, that you didn't do, probably was a dream.’ Things like that. But it was definitely not a dream.”
They're an actual blood relative?
“Yeah. Yeah.”
What do you think now about what they did?
“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.” (...)
I believe a common reaction in such situations is to be angry about losing an innocence that shouldn't have been lost. Do you relate to that?
“Absolutely, yes. It teaches you to definitely be sexual earlier than you should have, than you're supposed to. 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.”
And do you think that set you on a path that you kept on?
“Yeah. In a lot of ways, absolutely. I think so.”
The Confessions of R. Kelly
