Soulless

by Jim Derogatis

  Chicago’s black radio stations harshly criticized police for harassing a hometown hero and overreacting by seizing his SUV. A CPD spokesman noted that 4,764 vehicles had been impounded under the ordinance the previous year, and Kelly had been treated no different than any offender. The singer did seem to get special treatment in court, however, which later struck Abdon as unusual. In July 1998, at a hearing that lasted less than a minute, the city dropped its charges.

  Kelly’s fans applauded, but law enforcement sources told Abdon and me the arrest had never been “only” about the noise. Cops on the beat near the Rock ’N’ Roll McDonald’s knew the Youth Division of the Special Investigations Unit was looking at Kelly for sexual encounters with underage girls, and they believed he cruised for teens at the garish theme restaurant. Kelly also frequented Evergreen Plaza shopping mall on the South Side, and he loved when girls recognized him there. “We’d go to the shopping mall in every city we visited,” Demetrius Smith said. Chicago cops told Abdon and me they “kept an eye out” for Kelly at Evergreen Plaza, too.

  A few weeks earlier, before the fax prompted me to check the liner notes for TP-2.com, I hadn’t realized Kelly had a family. His second wedding, midway between the first with Aaliyah in 1994 and the settlement with Tiffany in 1998, never garnered any mention in the press. Although we couldn’t even find the date of the wedding, Abdon and I learned in public-records searches that in 1996, Kelly married twenty-two-year-old Andrea Lee, a dancer from his touring troupe. Sources said they met when she was nineteen. They had two children, Jaya, born earlier that year, and Joann, born in 1998 and named after Kelly’s mother.

  “He married Andrea to take the attention off of Aaliyah, but he never talks about her,” Smith said. Kelly never stopped pursuing other girls, and sources led me to one whose relationship ended a little more than a year before I got the fax, three years after Kelly married Andrea.

  A Los Angeles girl told me the singer first tried to seduce her when she visited the set for the video of “If I Could Turn Back the Hands of Time” in the spring of 1999. She was a seventeen-year-old high school senior when one of Kelly’s assistants pressed a tiny balled-up piece of paper with a phone number on it into the palm of her hand. “From there we just started talking over the phone.” She told him her age. “I don’t believe in lying, but he was trying to woo me out there to Chicago despite the fact. Once I brought up the whole thing of, ‘Well, I have to ask my mother,’ he was like, ‘You told your mom? Well, just wait then.’”

  The Los Angeles girl told me she continued talking to Kelly, and when they engaged in phone sex, he said they were “soul mates.” She believed he loved her, and after he sent her a plane ticket to visit Chicago on her eighteenth birthday, she had sex with him for the first time in August 1999. He never told her he was married, and they started fighting as soon as she found out. “I do believe he does have a problem,” she said. “I look back at it now and I think I was stupid; why the hell did I even go out there at all? There are some couples that there is a big age difference, but in this situation, I think that he really does have some kind of sexual problem. . . . He was like, ‘You need to act older. There’s fifteen-year-old girls who act like they’re twenty-one years old.’”

  Three weeks into our reporting, Abdon and I felt we had enough for a story, but as we sat in Don Hayner’s office reviewing everything we’d learned about R. Kelly and underage girls, the city editor pointed out that all the relationships we could document had taken place in the past. What about the present? “Right now,” the fax had said, “he’s messing with a thirteen-year-old girl who he tells people is his goddaughter. . . . Robert hired her father, who is a bass player.”

  Several sources confirmed that the prominent thanks in the liner notes of TP-2.com for “my goddaughter Reshona, Greg, and Valerie” referred to Reshona Landfair and her parents, who lived in the village of Oak Park, just west of Chicago. Reshona had recently enrolled at Oak Park and River Forest High School, and four sources told us her sexual contact with Kelly was ongoing. She was now fourteen. We also learned Kelly was allegedly having sexual contact with another girl a year younger, thirteen, from the southwest suburbs, with whom Reshona was close. Abdon and I found the second girl’s eighth-grade school photo. We failed to connect with her family or the Landfairs the many times we called, but we made one last, determined push for our story in the Sun-Times.

  We had learned a lot about the second girl’s family, which had a high profile in the black community, unusual for the girls Kelly seemed to pursue. We visited their ostentatious McMansion, newly constructed at a cost of $830,000. The first two times, we didn’t get past the gated entry at the end of a long driveway. On our last trip, the gate was open. We parked in the circle in front of the house and rang the bell, but when the girl’s father opened the door, he threatened to kick our asses if we didn’t leave immediately, an attitude that seemed distinctly at odds with the genteel setting and his profession. It was by far the nastiest reception we got.

  That girl’s name has never been published, and neither she nor her family members have ever spoken publicly about Kelly. Like most newspapers, the Sun-Times did not identify underage crime victims, unless they had been murdered, and it did not name rape victims of any age, unless they made the brave and harrowing decision to go public. This book does not identify any victim unless the woman specifically spoke to me on the record, or her name inescapably became public in court proceedings, like Reshona Landfair, or in legal filings that she initiated, like Tiffany Hawkins.

  Abdon and I had no more success when we rang the bell again at the Landfair residence, a quaint, two-story, cream-colored stucco house with white-trimmed windows behind a small patch of lawn from which the last of early December’s falling leaves had just been raked. A seven- or eight-year-old station wagon sat in front, parked on the street. When a relative answered the door at the side of the building, before we could even introduce ourselves, she barked, “Ain’t we made it clear we ain’t talking to you?” But the next day, I did connect with Reshona’s aunt, her mother Valerie’s sister, Stephanie Edwards.

  For a time, Edwards was married to Earl Robinson, who had been a member of Public Announcement with Kelly. She was a singer herself, and she recorded under the name Sparkle. She was Sparkle to everyone, including family, just like Madonna is always Madonna. Sparkle met Kelly in 1989, when he produced Billy Ocean. Three years later, he asked her to come to the studio, where he auditioned her. She sang backing vocals on Age Ain’t Nothing but a Number, augmenting what she called “Aaliyah’s posse . . . They were called Second Chapter, it was three girls,” she later told The Breakfast Club, a syndicated radio show. She named Jovante Cunningham as one of the three and said, “One of the girls is rapping, you can hear it all through Aaliyah’s first album.” Sparkle didn’t name her, but that was Tiffany Hawkins. The third was Tiffany’s Kenwood Academy classmate, who spoke to me off the record, and who’s never gone public.

  Kelly tried to seduce Sparkle, she and all my sources agreed. Sparkle says she wanted to keep the relationship strictly professional, confining it to sessions at CRC and the occasional meal at Kelly’s favorite restaurant, the Rock ’N’ Roll McDonald’s. She did introduce Kelly to her family, including her brother-in-law, Greg Landfair. The star always needed musicians, and in late 1997, Kelly was also looking for new artists. He had struck a deal with Interscope Records to distribute albums he produced for artists he signed to his new boutique label, Rockland Records.

  Interscope had been cofounded in 1990 by the Brooklyn-born record producer Jimmy Iovine, whose credits included albums by John Lennon and Bruce Springsteen. His partner was Chicago native and media entrepreneur Ted Field, the son of Marshall Field IV, a department-store magnate who also owned the Sun-Times from 1956 to 1965. Interscope quickly became one of the most successful and edgiest labels in the music business, thanks to a deal with the hard-core hip-hop label Death Row and hit releases by Tupac Shakur, Dr. Dre, and Sno
op Dogg. Kelly’s Rockland imprint released a handful of albums through Interscope between 1998 and 2001, but the self-titled debut he produced for Sparkle was its only hit. Sparkle sold half a million copies and reached No. 3 on the Billboard albums chart in May 1998. Then Kelly’s latest protégé split from him.

  Sparkle had just released her second album, Told You So, on Motown Records when a publicist at her new label connected us for a phone interview. We talked for a couple of minutes about her sophomore disc before I clumsily shifted to the real reason I called, asking Sparkle why she had broken from Kelly. “R. Kelly is a great songwriter, producer, and all of that, but business-wise, he ain’t so great. And things happen, a lot of things I can’t really touch on.” I asked if she meant something happened between Kelly and her niece Reshona Landfair. She did not seem surprised by the question.

  Sparkle said she introduced Kelly to Reshona, “my heart,” when her niece was twelve. “I introduced them because she is a rapper and I introduced her in hopes that maybe Robert could possibly help her do something. After which she continued to hang out with me and be around me. And after I left the whole situation, to me, I just didn’t feel like that was a great situation for her to be around anymore, but I’m not her parents or whatever.” Sparkle ended the interview abruptly after those comments.

  In December 2000, police told Abdon, they had interviewed Reshona twice over the last eighteen months. “She denied having any type or form of sexual encounter with Robert Kelly,” an investigator later told me. They said that when they questioned her parents, Greg and Valerie Landfair, “They looked at me straight in the eye and said, ‘We have nothing to say to you.’ They were ice-cold.” We also learned that the Illinois Division of Children and Family Services had investigated the parents. They “apparently let Kelly take the girl on the road with him and have sexual relations with her, with their full knowledge and consent,” according to an email from an anonymous source at the agency. Citing confidentiality, a DCFS spokesperson declined official comment, but a second source confirmed what we learned in the email.

  The story Abdon and I began writing on the second weekend in December 2000 made no mention of Reshona or the second girl whose eighth-grade photo I had in a folder on my desk. We were frustrated that we hadn’t learned enough to include the information about possible ongoing examples of statutory rape, but we did think we’d confirmed the central allegation in the fax: “Robert’s problem—and it’s a thing that goes back many years—is young girls.”

  Abdon always left the writing to me, reading and then tweaking drafts as we kicked the story back and forth. When we had a final draft, we started the long process of answering queries and approving changes requested by Don Hayner and two other editors on the city desk. Once we cleared those hurdles, the story moved to legal vetting by the paper’s outside counsel, Damon Dunn, and, given its explosive nature, final reads by the two executives at the top of the masthead, editor Michael Cooke and publisher John Cruickshank.

  Cooke was a boisterous Fleet Street veteran imported to run editorial for Lord Conrad Black’s American flagship while his fellow but more reserved Canadian John Cruickshank handled the business side, though their duties often overlapped. Reporters in the newsroom called them “Hook and Crook,” because of the alliteration, not the securities fraud that eventually landed their boss and the paper’s owner behind bars. They slated publication of our article for December 21, the day before Kelly was set to headline the Big Jam Christmas Concert sponsored by WGCI-FM, the R&B powerhouse of the Midwest.

  Early on December 20, I made another call to Kelly’s spokeswoman, Regina Daniels. The first time we talked, I’d only asked her about Aaliyah, and she’d rambled on. Now I carefully outlined all the other accusations in our piece, seeking comment from the singer. Daniels said she didn’t even need to check with him. “I have no comment to make. There are a lot of people who are very much a player-hater of Robert. All I can go by is the years that I’ve worked with him and what I’ve seen. I’m not saying anybody is beyond doing what I don’t see, but I’m not looking under the covers with him. All I know is that he has presented himself to me to be a respectable person, and that is what I can go by.”

  After four weeks of sixteen-hour days, working through weekends and juggling the emotionally draining Kelly reporting with our regular assignments, Abdon and I felt exhausted but wired. We were frustrated by the angles we hadn’t nailed, yet confident of a lede we’d spent more time crafting under more scrutinizing eyes than the first paragraph of any other story either of us had ever written.

  Chicago singer and songwriter R. Kelly used his position of fame and influence as a pop superstar to meet girls as young as fifteen and have sex with them, according to court records and interviews.

  The story continued from there for nearly three thousand words, not counting the timeline sidebar I wrote charting Kelly’s career for any readers still unaware of his success. The paper’s lawyer, Damon Dunn, had been one of those. He’d never heard of Kelly before he read our story, he wrote in a memo, but concluded Kelly and Aaliyah were public figures, and “I see no basis for actual malice in the story,” the key consideration for a libel suit.

  Our report started on the bottom of page one as the third of the three biggest stories of the day, but it spread across three full pages inside, an extraordinary amount of space for a tabloid. Abdon and I hovered in the newsroom to read the final page proofs, then headed to the Billy Goat Tavern, the old-time newspaper hangout on the lower level of North Michigan Avenue between the Tribune and the Sun-Times. I hated the place—it seemed like a cliché out of The Front Page, to say nothing of the annoying Saturday Night Live “cheezborger, cheezborger” shtick—but Abdon was a regular.

  Well aware that we were acting like a couple of j-school novices eager to see their first bylines in the college paper, we emerged after last call to grab the first-offs, the earliest copies of the first edition, which drivers loaded in bundles onto a fleet of idling delivery trucks destined for the suburbs. The rest of the city got the second edition a few hours later with the late sports scores. We were proud of the story. Everyone we’d worked with at the paper was, and we had gotten incredible institutional support. We expected the piece to have real impact the next day. It didn’t.

  The rival Chicago Tribune ignored our story, and the local television news broadcasts made only passing mention in connection with Kelly’s Christmas concert. The Associated Press ran a short item stating “the Sun-Times has reported . . . ,” briefly recapping our work. No other news organization added to what we reported. The Kelly camp issued another one-sentence statement by Daniels—“It saddens me that anyone would write anything like that”—but callers overwhelmed Chicago’s black radio stations. “Some were angry at Kelly,” Abdon wrote in a follow-up piece. “Others blamed the girls. Some callers and hosts heaped criticism on the Sun-Times for reporting the story.”

  WGCI-FM’s popular morning host, “Crazy” Howard McGee, called the Tiffany and Aaliyah legal filings “old news,” although the specifics we found had never been reported. He dismissed the charges of sex with underage girls as “only allegations” and urged listeners to “pray for brother Robert.” His boss, Elroy Smith, program director for both WGCI and WVAZ, noted that “I Wish” was the most-requested song on the stations’ playlists, and he had no intention of removing it.

  The Sun-Times sent Dave Hoekstra to review the holiday concert, which I happily avoided. In place of the skit on the giant bed, this show ended with Kelly singing “I Believe I Can Fly” with a gospel choir as forty children sat behind him on a white staircase. “Traditionally, an R. Kelly concert is more naughty than nice,” Hoekstra wrote in a review that ran on Christmas Eve. “It was a more mellow R. Kelly who headlined WGCI’s Big Jam concert before 22,000 adoring fans at the United Center. Part of me believes that Kelly simply was caught up in the holiday spirit. Another part of me believes Kelly was responding to revelations that he allegedly liked to
fool around with teenage girls.”

  That last line infuriated me, and I was angry with the copy desk for letting it fly. The story Abdon and I had worked on so hard for so long, and which had been so carefully edited and vetted by so many hands at the paper, accused Kelly of criminal behavior that ruined young lives. We’d provided proof for those charges, as well as context to separate them from the usual “celebrity misbehavior.” One awkward paragraph our editors insisted we include read, “Kelly is hardly the first celebrity to be accused of taking advantage of underage girls. Gary Glitter, Rob Lowe, Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, Roman Polanski, Rolling Stone Bill Wyman and even the legendary Errol Flynn all have been written about in this paper and others for allegedly having trysts with minors.” We also mentioned the charges against Michael Jackson. Clearly, we hadn’t done enough to make the case that this was more than “fooling around with teenage girls.”

  I knew pop music history well, and I understood groupie culture. Several of my Gen-X music-critic peers, notably Ann Powers, now saw the celebrated groupies of the sixties and seventies through the prism of postfeminism. They portrayed the GTOs (Girls Together Outrageously) and Chicagoan Cynthia Plaster Caster as teenage girls who’d slept with rock stars as acts of self-empowerment. I was dubious. Pamela Des Barres had become famous for her 1987 memoir, I’m with the Band: Confessions of a Groupie, but two of her fellow GTOs died young, one of a drug overdose and another of complications from AIDS. Cynthia, famous for her plaster casts of rock stars’ male members, told me and others as many harrowing tales of life on the road as inspiring ones.