Soulless

by Jim Derogatis

  The lawsuit claimed Kelly “had a propensity to have sexual contact with minors,” and that he began a relationship with Tiffany in 1991, when she was fifteen and he was twenty-four. She became a frequent presence at CRC, earning $300 in cash from Kelly when she sang backing vocals on Born into the 90’s, and a $1,500 check from Barry Hankerson when she performed as a “back-up rapper” on Aaliyah’s Age Ain’t Nothing but a Number. In addition to allegations of underage sex, the lawsuit charged sexual harassment in the workplace, since Kelly had employed Tiffany in the studio. In a subsequent motion deeper in the stack of papers, Kelly’s attorneys argued that such allegations must first be aired before the Illinois Department of Human Rights, and Tiffany’s attorney dropped that claim.

  Tiffany also frequently visited Kelly at home, according to her lawsuit. The first apartment he bought was on the fifteenth floor of Burnham Park Plaza on South Wabash Avenue in the South Loop, a building he’d lived in before, back when it was the YMCA Hotel. The landmark neon sign atop the building had been replaced by a glass pyramid housing a five-level sundeck and an outdoor hot tub, and the rooms he’d once rented while busking had been converted to luxury condo units. Kelly then moved to even fancier digs, a forty-second-floor condo in the Parkshore Tower, on the Lake Michigan waterfront just south of Navy Pier.

  In colorless language belying the drama of the story it told, the lawsuit claimed Kelly kicked Tiffany out of the recording studio whenever she didn’t want to have sex, and that she agreed to some of the acts he demanded in the studio and at his homes, including threesomes with other underage girls. The suit also claimed she traveled and had sexual contact with Kelly on his tour bus in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Indiana, and Washington, D.C.

  Abdon broke off to check the newsroom’s small legal library. The age of consent varies from state to state, and so does the statute of limitations. Illinois prohibits adult men from having sex with girls under seventeen, but prosecutions for statutory rape must be brought within three years. The statute for criminal charges had not expired when Tiffany filed her lawsuit in 1996, but the state’s attorney in Illinois generally avoided these cases, Abdon said, because of the difficulty of proving them when it came down to “he said/she said.”

  The office had pursued one such prosecution six years earlier, however, in a case that would come to reflect and be intertwined with Kelly’s life in important ways. In August 1994, a grand jury indicted Rep. Mel Reynolds for sexual assault and criminal sexual abuse in a relationship with a sixteen-year-old volunteer during his successful 1992 campaign for Congress. A rising star in South Side politics, Reynolds was convicted in 1995 and sentenced to five years in prison. He resigned from the House in disgrace, but the state drew harsh criticism for its handling of the case. During the trial, the victim recanted her grand jury testimony, cited her Fifth Amendment right not to incriminate herself, and refused to answer questions on the stand. The judge held her in contempt of court and jailed her. This treatment of an underage victim fueled arguments by the congressman’s defenders that the prosecution had been politically motivated to bring down a successful black politician, and the state didn’t really care about the victim at all.

  Abdon and I returned to the file. The sexual contact between Tiffany and Kelly continued for almost three years, according to the lawsuit, ending four months before her eighteenth birthday, in October 1994. The lawsuit didn’t say why it ended but claimed Tiffany was devastated, and two months later, she attempted suicide and spent time at Advocate Trinity Hospital on the South Side. Naming as co-defendants Kelly, Jive Records, and Hankerson’s management company, Blackground Enterprises, Tiffany sought $10 million in damages. Her filings included a list of twenty-two witnesses who “presumably will testify” or had already promised to do so, among them Aaliyah, Barry Hankerson, Wayne Williams, members of Public Announcement, staffers at CRC, and Robert’s half brother Carey.

  Why the hell has none of this been reported? I asked when we came up for air.

  Abdon said all the competing reporters who regularly checked the bin of legal filings at the Daley Center were white, and they might not have recognized the name “Robert Sylvester Kelly,” or even known who R. Kelly was. Plus, the plaintiff’s attorney filed late in the day on December 24. Most reporters went home early for the holidays and didn’t return until the new year. We soon learned that Kelly’s four lawyers also outflanked their adversary. Tiffany’s attorney had notified them of the forthcoming suit on December 5, and hours before her claim was filed on Christmas Eve, Kelly’s camp filed a five-page lawsuit of their own. The singer sought damages of $30,000 from Tiffany, charging she had demanded “substantial sums of cash” and a recording contract, or she would “widely publicize the false allegations” that he had fathered her child.

  Abdon added a sticky note: “Child? Check.”

  The hundreds of pages in Tiffany’s file made no mention of a paternity claim from her side, and that allegation and the accusation of blackmail never appeared again in any subsequent filing by Kelly’s team over the next two years, but his attorneys seemed to want to win a public-relations battle, not a legal fight. Abdon and I got two hits for stories mentioning Kelly and Tiffany in a search of the Nexis news database, both gossip-column items planted by the singer’s high-priced New York publicity firm, Dan Klores Associates. The day after Christmas, 1996, columnist Jim Rutenberg reported the Kelly lawsuit in the Daily News, quoting Klores: “Many celebrities are constantly being harassed and sued, and more often than not, they decide to settle. Kelly has decided, ‘No way.’” The same day, Klores told Sun-Times gossip columnist Bill Zwecker, “R. Kelly one-hundred-percent denies that he is the father of this child, one-hundred-percent denies he has had sexual relations with Tiffany Hawkins.”

  Abdon and I walked across the newsroom to the row of offices occupied by the columnists. We asked our colleague Bill Zwecker if he remembered the story. He vaguely recalled being glad to get a tip from Klores during the notorious holiday news drought, but he didn’t know about the more explosive charges in the suit filed by Tiffany. Rutenberg never reported them either. We later learned Tiffany did have a baby after her relationship with Kelly, but the father was a high school boyfriend.

  While no other publications picked up the story of the alleged paternity shakedown, Klores and the Kelly team had succeeded in getting in front of a potential scandal. Tiffany’s charges were buried, until we found them four years later, thanks to the fax. The voluminous case folder Abdon procured ended with a one-page notice filed on January 23, 1998. The case had been settled out of court.

  The next morning, Abdon and I made our first phones calls via speakerphone from his desk, but they shed little light on the resolution of the claim. “There’s a confidentiality agreement, we can’t discuss it,” said Kim Jones, an assistant to attorney Susan Loggans. Gerald Margolis, a celebrity lawyer in Los Angeles who also represented Courtney Love, Robin Williams, and Mick Jagger, told us, “There was a complaint by Kelly, there was a complaint by her, it was settled, and the settlement is confidential. I have nothing else to say about that case now or ever.” Sheila Hawkins, Tiffany’s mother, picked up the phone and said the terms of the settlement forbade her or her daughter from talking to the press. A few days later, we visited to see if she’d talk in person, if only on background, but when we rang the bell of a small, neatly kept brick bungalow in the South Side neighborhood of Cottage Grove Heights, the door opened a crack, then a middle-aged woman in a nurse’s uniform snapped the deadbolt shut.

  Abdon and I thought the story was bigger than the tale of one settled lawsuit, and we spent four weeks digging into every allegation in the anonymous letter. We logged a lot of miles on the South and West Sides, returning to some addresses two or three times, on crisp mornings, sunny fall afternoons, and frigid evenings, trying different times to find anyone at home. We also rang doorbells in the freezing rain in the predominantly black suburbs of Maywood and Bellwood on the West Side, and in the s
outh suburban village of Olympia Fields. None of the addresses were in the projects. Most were homes like the wood-frame fixer-upper with avocado-green aluminum siding where I grew up in Jersey City, or the brick row house in Chicago’s Belmont Cragin bungalow belt, where Abdon’s parents raised him and four sisters.

  As soon as some people realized the awkward, mismatched white duo on the porch weren’t cops, social workers, religious proselytizers, or salesmen, they invited us in and shared stories and photos about friends and relatives they said had been wronged by Kelly. Not a single person we spoke with seemed surprised when we asked about him and underage girls. Some proved eager to talk, saying no one had wanted to listen before. We were not part of their community exactly, but we were willing to listen, and it always helped that I could talk with anyone about almost any musical genre. Music, whether Curtis Mayfield or Mavis Staples or Common (all of whom I’d been lucky enough to interview), was often the key to getting the conversations rolling.

  One woman I interviewed on my own invited me into the living room of a first-floor apartment in a meticulously well-kept two-flat on the West Side. She offered me tea and alternately cried and raged about how Kelly had treated a family member, who she said couldn’t talk. Judge Judy played on the TV as we sat on the couch, and a small terrier yipped and ran in circles whenever its owner sobbed or raised her voice. “He needs help,” she said, “and he needs to stop hurting people.” Abdon and I heard similar comments from almost everyone we interviewed. Few said they hated Kelly. It was always, “Brother needs help. Brother’s got to stop.”

  We hit a lot of dead ends, none more frustrating than the night we pulled up to an address on Devon Avenue in Chicago’s Little India neighborhood on the Northwest Side. A source had led us to believe the anonymous fax had come from “an older church lady” who had quit her job in Kelly’s office, disgusted by his behavior and frustrated that he refused to address “his problem.” We thought we’d found her home during a search of driver’s records, but instead arrived at a Mail Boxes Etc. store. The next morning, the manager told us we couldn’t leave a note because the box had been closed with no forwarding address. We later heard that the older church lady, who may or may not have been my anonymous correspondent, had left Chicago. We never did succeed in tracking her down. To this day I don’t know for certain who sent the fax.

  When we weren’t driving around together, Abdon and I divided our labors. He ran searches on the database tools in the newsroom and at the courts, looking into every name mentioned in the fax or in Tiffany’s lawsuit. He printed out hundreds of pages of background information, phone numbers, and addresses. Given his expertise, Abdon also talked to lawyers, investigators, and court personnel. I called everyone else, starting with the numbers we found for people on Tiffany’s witness list, as well as reaching out to everyone I could think of in the music world with a connection to Kelly.

  One of my first calls, to a number an organizer of that Grammy press conference insisted did not come from them, started a relationship with a well-placed member of Kelly’s inner circle who became an invaluable source for the next seven and a half years, sometimes calling as many as four or five times a week from ever-changing mobile-phone numbers. We agreed I could use any of the information provided in those calls, but not for attribution, and the pact with the former associate stands in this book.

  Demetrius Smith became another key source. “Johnny-Boy” to friends and family, Smith grew up in Chicago’s Cabrini-Green and Henry Horner Homes housing projects, and he spent thirteen years at Kelly’s side, starting in the early days of busking on the “L” platforms. As the singer’s career took off, Smith became a personal assistant, road manager, and production overseer, until he found God and quit five years before we first talked in 2000. We initially spoke off the record, but Smith later went public with much of what he told me, self-publishing a book in 2011. He wrote The Man Behind the Man: Looking from the Inside Out while serving sixty-four months in a California prison for shoplifting iPods from Target stores, but he emerged to reconnect with his children and his God. He told me he quit in disgust over Kelly’s behavior, though the singer’s camp maintains he was fired.

  I called Wayne Williams, Kelly’s A&R man, who’d earlier told me nothing had happened between Kelly and Aaliyah. He had nothing new to say now and suggested I stick to writing my music columns.

  Barry Hankerson, the manager who had started working with Kelly before Born into the 90’s, only spoke to me on the record a few times, and very briefly. For eight years, he did more than anyone else to make Kelly a star, but he confirmed that he quit in February 2000, five and a half years after Kelly produced Age Ain’t Nothing but a Number for his niece, Aaliyah. Hankerson would not address that relationship, but he said he resigned as Kelly’s manager in a letter to the star’s Los Angeles attorney, Gerald Margolis, copying the founder and head of Jive Records, Clive Calder. Hankerson didn’t elaborate or share the letter, but he allowed his lawyer to confirm its substance to me, including the key passage that he was leaving because he believed Kelly needed psychiatric help for a compulsion to pursue underage girls.

  The Kelly camp maintained that Hankerson was also fired, but sources told me that as a condition of severing their relationship, Hankerson retained a significant share of the artist’s royalties for the albums Kelly released during his time as manager. Some said he kept all of Kelly’s share from those recordings.

  Two of Tiffany’s close friends, who sometimes called her Tia, spoke to me during lengthy phone calls. One attended Kenwood Academy with her, singing in the choir and sharing the dream of making it in the music business. The other went to a different high school but moved in the same circle as Tiffany and the Kenwood classmate. These sources and four others helped Abdon and I piece together a fuller picture of what allegedly happened between Tiffany and Kelly.

  Five-foot-six, with an athletic build and a wide, winning smile, Tiffany enrolled at Kenwood in the fall of 1991. She took the bus most mornings from the South Side neighborhood where she lived with her single mom, who was studying to be a nurse. Like most of the students in Room 126, she seemed starstruck when Kelly came to Lena McLin’s class in 1991, returning to the school he continued to visit long after dropping out. A few months before the release of Born into the 90’s, he stood at the front of the room between the cork bulletin board and the brown chalkboard and launched into song. No one could remember exactly what he sang, but he wowed the students because he sang especially for them.

  A few weeks later, Tiffany and a friend saw Kelly cruising in Hyde Park in his luxury SUV. The girls waved him down and gushed about seeing him in Ms. McLin’s classroom. Since they were singers, he invited them to CRC to watch him record. Tiffany began hanging out in the studio, and after she contributed to some of Kelly’s sessions, she believed he’d make her a star. The Kenwood classmate said she and Tiffany sometimes spent all night at CRC, “until twelve the next noon,” and she actually had sexual contact with Kelly before Tiffany did, when she was sixteen and Kelly was twenty-four. The Kenwood classmate never witnessed Kelly having sexual contact with Tiffany, but “I did see him messing with her, playing with her breasts and rubbing on her.” Once, she had sexual contact with Kelly while Tiffany watched “and he played with her.”

  Six years after she last saw Kelly, the Kenwood classmate broke down in tears several times when she talked about him. “I’m gonna be honest with you, I still love R. Kelly’s music. I don’t hate him. It’s a love/hate kind of relationship. He kind of reminds me of like a boyfriend who hurt you that you still love. I’m not trying to down him, because really, honestly, I think it has to be a sickness. The attraction he had to the girls I seen him with—he likes skinny, skinny, malnourished-looking little girls.” She paused, sobbing. “Looking at the pictures of how me and Tiffany were when we were freshmen, we were ugly little girls compared to what he could have had.”

  That statement tore at me, and so did her crying. It took me
hours to decompress after that interview, and many of those that followed. I hated making anyone cry, and I tried to be empathetic, but I also had to be a reporter, to keep asking questions, to confirm details, to remain skeptical and “objective,” whatever the hell that means. The ideals emphasized in my journalism classes at NYU proved goddamn difficult to maintain with someone emotionally baring intimate and painful details.

  Kelly told both teenagers, “I’m gonna make you a star,” the Kenwood classmate said, but he added that if they were serious about music, “You gonna have to be at the recording studio and not at school, because school ain’t gonna make you a millionaire.” Both she and Tiffany dropped out of Kenwood, and when we talked, Tiffany’s classmate regretted taking R. Kelly’s advice. “That was the biggest hurt to me, and to this day, I feel that I could be something else if I stayed in school.”

  Sometimes, Kelly gave the girls gifts. “He treated us very well,” the Kenwood classmate said. “We got anything we asked for, but we weren’t going to ask for much. A pair of Air Jordans or a hundred dollars was a lot of money to us.” She said she stopped having sexual contact with Kelly because “I have this jealous thing when I’m sleeping with somebody; if they sleep with somebody else, I kind of get upset.” She thought Tiffany’s relationship ended for similar reasons. “Tiffany was jealous of other girls, period. Even though Tiffany claimed to be close to her, she was kind of jealous of Aaliyah,” whom the two met when Aaliyah was twelve. “Later, I guess Tiffany was trying to be around to cock-block, or whatever you want to call it, because I know Robert was sleeping with Aaliyah. And then Tiffany and Aaliyah fell out.”