The journalist who’s been covering R. Kelly for 17 years: "This is rape culture"
Jim DeRogatis
I will confess to you that I took that fax and I threw it on the corner of my desk. I thought, "Player hater." But something about these facts bothered me. It mentioned the Chicago sex crimes unit, and it named the head investigator.
I called the PD and asked for her. I said, "I'm wondering about R. Kelly." She said, "Oh. It's about time somebody finally called about this. I can't talk to you." And hung up.
Anyway, we found this lawsuit by a young Chicago woman who claimed that Kelly picked her up when he came to give a lecture to his alma mater choir class at Kenwood Academy. The allegations were horrifying — mainly that Kelly had had sex with her at 14. That he'd arranged threesomes with some of her fellow sophomores. And that when the relationship ended, when she was two years older, she had slit her wrists and tried to kill herself. This lawsuit had never been reported.
We found other lawsuits. We got documents slipped to us that had been sealed in Michigan, when Kelly's marriage to Aaliyah was annulled. We proved that Aaliyah was, in fact, 15 at the time, and that the certificate of marriage had been falsified to say she was 18.
Jim DeRogatis
Yes, around Thanksgiving the following year, 2001, the 26-minute, 39-second videotape that prosecutors allege shows him having sex with a 14-year-old and urinating in her mouth came to me. The Chicago Sun-Times turned it over to the police.
He was indicted for making child pornography. A really important distinction — that so many of my sloppy fellow journalists do not get right — is he was
never tried for statutory rape for sex with minors. He was tried for making child pornography, which never made much sense to any of us. Why are you not also charging him with sex with a child?
The answer is the parents and the girl never cooperated with the police and did not testify in the trial. Three dozen witnesses did: her aunt, family members, pastor, best friends, best friends' parents, basketball coach, you name it. They all said this was the girl and that was her age. But because there was no victim — and this is classic rape culture — there was no crime.
Nothing was ever introduced in court of the dozen-plus civil settlements in which [Kelly] had paid off young women who had either filed lawsuits or had directly accused him before they even filed. Instead of a pattern of a long period of behavior, it was about one girl and one videotape. That was how he was acquitted.
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So many people are at fault for r.kelly thriving this long, a system that refuses to bring justice, parents using their daughters as bargaining chips so they can step up the social hierarchy, the media who refuses to tell this story leaving it to small scale bloggers to try and dig up all the facts.
How could you ever fix your lips or use those fingers to insinuate minors are to blame for being assaulted.
. . Nvm
@Booksnrain has arrived to crush the building
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fukk this cac for leaking the tape to the streets...He a sick mf too, he literally made 100s of copies of Child porn & passed it out like it was candy... He guilty too
. They won't stop at R Kelly,they will come after the long list of black male legends who messed with underage girls just like R Kelly. Based on their current viewpoint which is not relevant to the time at which this happened.
?Yall start with Chris Brown who doesn't have 1% of the catalogue of R Kelly before you tell generations of people before you we need to give up Marvin Gay,R Kelly,Prince,MJ.
