On the other hand, I was no prude. I had rejected my Catholic indoctrination as a high school freshman. “Do what thou wilt is the whole of the law, so long as ye shall harm none” stood as my philosophy, derived third-hand from Led Zeppelin via Aleister Crowley, who got it from the Wiccan Rede posited by Doreen Valiente in 1964. Dubious pedigree aside, the last part about harming none is key, and treat others as you’d have them treat you is a cornerstone of most systems of ethical beliefs. Rather than “fooling around,” Kelly was destroying lives. Tiffany Hawkins had attempted suicide, according to her lawsuit.
My colleague’s use of “teenage girls” bothered me, too. Any parent or teacher can attest that there are enormous differences between thirteen-, fourteen-, or fifteen-year-old girls and young women of eighteen or nineteen. Abdon and I had seen the grammar school photos and high school yearbooks. We’d met some of the girls and their friends and families. They’d shown us evidence of how the victims had been hurt, but we’d apparently failed to make some of our own colleagues see what we’d seen, much less convince many of Kelly’s fans.
Our editors also sent Sun-Times reporter Sabrina Walters to interview members of Kelly’s audience at the holiday concert. Under the headline “Allegations Don’t Faze Fans,” she quoted an eighteen-year-old girl from suburban Bolingbrook who said, “His personal life doesn’t really concern me.” A twenty-nine-year-old woman from suburban Glenwood told her, “I know Robert. It’s not like him. It’s a publicity stunt on the girls’ part.” By the start of the new year, our attempt to reveal a pattern of predation already a decade old seemed to have been dismissed by many, and ignored or forgotten by most.
CHAPTER 5
NUMEROUS
During our reporting in late 2000 for the first story in the Chicago Sun-Times about R. Kelly’s pursuit of underage girls, several of my sources told me about “the girl in Miami.” Abdon Pallasch and I never succeeded in tracking her down, but she emailed me eighteen years later, and we began a series of long and emotional phone calls during which she spoke publicly for the first time about the sexual contact she says she had with Kelly twenty-three years earlier, when she was seventeen years old. On May 4, 2018, I finally told her story in BuzzFeed News. The girl in Miami was Lizzette Martinez.
After school one evening in the winter of 1995, two years after Tiffany Hawkins ended her relationship with Kelly and a year before she sued him, Lizzette went to the mall in Miami’s northern suburb of Aventura. She strolled around, window-shopping, while she waited for her best friend, Michella Powery, to finish her shift at the Merry-Go-Round clothing store. Inseparable since age twelve, the two teenagers were now cheerleaders in their last year at North Miami Beach Senior High School.
A light-skinned Puerto Rican with flowing black hair, almond eyes, and a radiant smile, Lizzette went to church every week and got excellent grades in school, though she and Michella also enjoyed sneaking into the clubs and hitting the dance floor. They chuckled when anyone called them party girls, because neither drank, did drugs, or slept around. Dreaming of a career in the music business, Lizzette sang in a female vocal trio called Sweet Sensations, but the group fell apart because one of her bandmates argued with her boyfriend, who pretended to be their manager.
When Lizzette spotted one of her musical idols strolling through Aventura Mall with a bodyguard, she let out an audible squeal. “I followed music, and I saw him with a really tall guy, maybe seven feet tall, and I said, ‘Oh, that’s R. Kelly!’ I guess he overheard me, and he came over and gave me a hug, and I was kind of stunned.”
After Kelly walked away, the bodyguard pressed a tiny balled-up piece of paper with a phone number into her hand and told her she should meet them later by the Sports Authority on Biscayne Boulevard. Lizzette couldn’t wait to tell Michella, but her best friend was unimpressed. “She told me that she just met R. Kelly, and I was like, ‘Okay, whatever.’” Michella agreed to tag along to Sports Authority anyway, thinking it would be an adventure. “So, we went to go meet him at this parking lot, and he was there with a bunch of other guys. I remember one gentleman’s name was Barry, and they took us to Outback.”
Barry was Barry Hankerson, Kelly’s manager. During dinner at Outback Steakhouse, Lizzette noticed that Hankerson kept looking at her with fatherly concern. “It’s like he felt bad, you know, like he wanted to help me.” The marriage between Kelly and Hankerson’s niece Aaliyah had been annulled only a few months earlier. The age of consent in Florida was eighteen, and Lizzette didn’t lie to Kelly. “I said, ‘I’m seventeen and I’m in high school,’ you know? It just came up at dinner, and Robert was like, ‘Oh, okay.’” She also told the star she sang, and he seemed eager to audition her. “You know, he makes it seem like he’s the coolest guy in the world, and he’s out to help you.”
Less shy and more direct than Lizzette, Michella came right out and asked the question many had been posing since the marriage certificate appeared in Vibe a year earlier: “Didn’t you marry Aaliyah?” Neither teen knew at the time that Hankerson was Aaliyah’s uncle, but the question embarrassed Lizzette nonetheless. Her cheeks flushed bright red. “I almost died. Barry was sitting there, and it was just, like, dead silence.” Finally, Kelly spoke up. “You can’t believe everything you read.”
The next day, the girls accepted Kelly’s invitation to visit Hit Factory Criteria recording studio, where the singer was holed up recording new material. “I sang for him, and he played the piano,” Lizzette said. “He said he wanted to help me and develop me and write songs, and I was really excited about it. I was like, ‘Wow, finally, my chance!’” But Kelly never recorded with her. “He would say to me, ‘When I get Rockland Records going, I’ll have you as an artist,’ because he was going to start his own label. I was writing songs myself, but he was always busy, that’s what he’d say.”
During subsequent visits to the studio, Michella said the towering bodyguard pulled her to the side while Kelly took Lizzette into another room. The bodyguard seemed to have eyes for Michella, but she wasn’t interested. “That was not my cup of tea.” She only went to the studio to look after her friend. “As much as I could, I would try to be around Lizzette when she was with him to make sure that everything was okay.” Word spread around school that the girls were hanging out with a superstar. “It was a big thing,” Michella said, but Kelly always seemed to make sure that no one outside his inner circle saw him with Lizzette. “It was like he kept me hidden,” she said. Soon enough, he pressured her to tell Michella to stop coming around, too.
Lizzette cried a lot when we first talked on the phone, and she sometimes broke down completely. Then she’d take a deep breath—“I’m all right”—and push forward with her story. The sexual contact with the twenty-eight-year-old star started within a month of that dinner at Outback, she said, and it continued for more than three years after he took her virginity. “I had stars in my eyes. I came from a broken home. I didn’t have a lot of support from my family, and I wanted to make it, you know? I mean, seventeen—I was like really naïve, really innocent.”
Michella believes she knows why Kelly chose Lizzette. “He seemed to look for girls who didn’t believe in themselves or had dad issues. Lizzette had daddy issues.” Another member of Kelly’s inner circle at that time put it like this: Night after night, the studio or the green room backstage might fill with twenty beautiful women. Nineteen could be twenty-one-year-olds, but Kelly consistently focused on the self-conscious teen standing alone in the corner, staring at her feet, too shy to talk. “He likes the babies, and that’s the sickness,” Demetrius Smith confirmed. “He can control her, and she don’t know no better.”
When Lizzette spent the night with Kelly, she lied and told her parents she stayed with Michella. Eventually, her mother and stepfather learned she was dating an older man. They didn’t approve, and Lizzette moved out and stayed with Michella’s family. She really spent most of her time with Kelly, at first in the studio or at his hotel in Miami, then in Chicago
.
“I was always hotel-hopping,” Lizzette said. She sometimes visited Chicago Trax, the new recording studio Kelly co-owned in a warehouse on North Larrabee Street near the Cabrini-Green housing project, but she never went to the home he had recently purchased for $3 million in a converted Baptist church on George Street in the North Side’s Lakeview neighborhood. She didn’t learn Kelly married Andrea Lee, his former dancer, until a year after their 1996 wedding, but Lizzette knew the singer slept with other women. “I couldn’t be with him all the time, because there were a million other women with him all the time.”
Despite his wealth, Kelly was a crude man, many sources told me, often going for days without showering, and sometimes wearing the same sweatpants for a week. “I could never understand the women. I’d be like, ‘How could you be with him when he stinks like that?’ I mean, this boy just left the basketball game and he ain’t took a shower,” Demetrius Smith said. Music was a huge part of the lure. The girls hoped he would give them a career, as he had Aaliyah, and of course, he played his own music for them. “Robert will sit in front of that piano and play to you and create a song right there in front of you,” Smith said. “I’ve seen Robert make women melt.”
Lizzette loved sitting beside Kelly at the piano while he sang. “He would never write anything down, it was just off the top of his head, and I was really impressed by him.” Sometimes, she wrote down the lyrics he’d just improvised or sung from memory. He had trouble doing that himself.
The relationship had warning signs, but Lizzette didn’t recognize them. “It was very controlled—what I wore, how I spoke, who my friends were, who I could bring around.” Kelly made her call him “Daddy.” She had to ask for food “like he owned me,” and he pressured her to perform some sexual acts against her will, including anal play and threesomes with another girl. “I knew that he was weird sexually, even though he was my first everything. It was just not normal to me. . . . His way of talking me into it was like, ‘I don’t think it’s weird, so you shouldn’t think it’s weird.’” She took a deep breath. “He has a way with people, with women. He’s just so controlling, so abusive.”
When Lizzette didn’t please him, she said Kelly lashed out. She claims the physical abuse started in Miami when she spoke to a driver Kelly sent to pick her up at school. “I couldn’t talk to any of them, you know?” When she did, she says she got smacked. Another time, they went to dinner before heading to the studio. “I said hello to someone, and he took me outside and he just smacked me,” she said. “I didn’t understand why, but basically, the instruction was, ‘When you’re sitting at the table, you only look at me and you only talk to me.’”
The worst beating occurred at Swissôtel Chicago, Lizzette said. She saw Kelly’s car downstairs, but he didn’t come to her room. When he finally appeared, “I asked him, ‘Do you have other girls here?’ Oh, God, he beat the shit out of me that night. Grabbing me, dragging me in the room. Someone heard, and I guess they called security. He was hiding behind the door when security came, and they asked, ‘Are you okay?’ Clearly, they knew I wasn’t, because . . . obviously.” Lizzette broke down in tears reliving that moment. “But he was on the side of me, and he was looking, like, ‘If you say something, I’m really going to kill you.’ And I just said, ‘I’m fine.’”
Kelly always seemed repentant after he got physical, Lizzette said. “Then, he’d be a nice guy. You know, ‘I love you, I’m sorry, you know I’m going to help you. I’m going to do everything for you, but you have to listen to me.’ It was always I wasn’t listening to him, I wasn’t doing what he wanted me to do, I wasn’t being the way he wanted me to be—a typical domestic-abusive relationship, and this was, like, my first relationship in my life.”
Lizzette told her friend Michella about the abuse at the time. “He’d leave her trapped up in a hotel room, and there was a couple of times where she called me and she was stranded and he was nowhere to be found,” Michella said. “She mentioned times that he had rough-handed her.” The relationship began to unravel when Lizzette grew tired of waiting alone in hotel rooms. Then, a year and a half after they met, when she was eighteen, she said she became pregnant with Kelly’s child.
“He wanted me to have an abortion. I came from a very Catholic background, and I didn’t believe in abortion. I was so scared. You know, I’m in Chicago by myself, this person is telling me this, and he’s never around, and I’m young.” One night, while waiting at the Marriott Downtown on Chicago’s Magnificent Mile, she miscarried. She tried to call Kelly but couldn’t reach him, and she went through the experience alone. “I guess it was for the best. I didn’t want to go through that abortion.”
The end finally came a year later, a little more than three years into the relationship, after Lizzette caught mononucleosis. “He had mono, and he canceled some shows, and he never told me. After I saw him a week later, I started to feel really sick, and I went to the hospital. They said, ‘You have mono. You need to go home.’ So I tried calling him, calling him. He wouldn’t answer, wouldn’t answer. My mono turned into Guillain-Barre, and my body basically shut down. I was almost completely paralyzed. My lungs almost collapsed.” She spent almost three weeks in intensive care back in Miami. “My parents called him, and he sent a thousand-dollar check to my mother.”
Rosa Villanueva, Lizzette’s mom, confirmed that she got a check. “I cannot stand this man,” she said, still furious many years later. She cried as we talked, too. “It’s not just my daughter; he does this to younger girls. I was devastated. When she came back, she was not the same. Mentally, physically, and emotionally, she was not the same.”
“After that, I was done,” Lizzette said. “You know, I was really hurt. I was damaged. I didn’t want to do music anymore. I kind of gave up on my dreams. I wanted to live a normal life. I was too young to go through those things.”
In her early twenties, Lizzette moved on with her life. She reconnected with a high school crush, they married, and she had twins. She initially thought about speaking out after she learned about the first story Abdon Pallasch and I published in December 2000. She thought about it again two years later, when she saw a report on local Miami TV news that mentioned Kelly settling several lawsuits brought by underage girls. She contacted an attorney who told her she could get justice by making Kelly pay, but she decided against it. “I wasn’t in it ever for money. I didn’t want to go through that. I was hurt by him, but I couldn’t rehash it again. It was just too much pain, and I had a new life.”
The lawyer Lizzette Martinez called, but never hired, was Susan E. Loggans.
“Chicago lawyer Susan Loggans usually gets what she wants,” reads the subhed of a glowing 1994 profile by Chicago Tribune business reporter Genevieve Buck. It portrays a maverick attorney with a list of professional and personal accomplishments so long it’s hard to believe. At least, I had a hard time believing it, but a quarter of a century later, brushing back her long blond hair as we talked via Skype, Loggans reiterated that in addition to being one of the best personal-injury lawyers in the country, she does indeed raise show horses and is a multi-engine, commercial-rated pilot who used to fly to California just to get her hair cut. “I decided that I wanted to be able to have, like, a pomp hairdo in the evening when I went to the Snuggery”—a bar on Chicago’s Gold Coast—“but I had to be able to look like a trial lawyer during the day, and I figured if I went someplace where they did actresses, that they would do that.”
“Invariably described as flashy, flamboyant, brash, sultry, and smart,” Buck wrote, Loggans told me she doesn’t disagree with that description. Born on New Year’s Eve, 1949, in the downstate Illinois farming town of Clinton (population 5,945 in 1950), she was raised by a divorced mom who was also a lawyer and who’d served as a lieutenant-commander in the navy. Loggans originally enrolled as a premed student at the University of Arkansas because Playboy had named it one of the top party schools. Over the next few years, she transferred to several other colleges,
earned several degrees, and passed the bar. “Bottom line: Great grades, but I decided against medicine. I got my master’s first in psychology, and I got my PhD after that. I wanted to be a trial lawyer because of the audience factor, because I wanted to do great things and be recognized.”
With a $60,000 loan, Loggans opened her own firm in 1977. She quickly made her name by winning big money in malpractice cases, including a $2.75 million settlement for a suit in DuPage County and a $4.5 million judgment in Will County. She loved media attention, kept a thick stack of her clips, and never said no to a television or radio interview. She also had her own call-in radio show for a few years. Not surprisingly, Loggans made enemies. “They call me ‘dragon lady’ around town,” she told Buck in the Trib. “I am very tenacious. I consider myself an extremely moral person with the highest of ethics. Within the bounds of doing everything ethical, yes, I’m tough, because I will do whatever it takes within those boundaries to be successful.”
Forty-eight years old when Tiffany Hawkins settled in 1998, Loggans turned pursuing cases brought by underage girls against R. Kelly into a specialty for the next two decades. “Word on the street got out after Tiffany that if you want to get money from Kelly, you hire Loggans,” one of Kelly’s former associates told me. Citing attorney-client confidentiality, she’s rarely commented about those cases on the record, and she’s never told me exactly how many of his victims she’s represented. “Numerous” is all she’d say every time I asked, for eighteen years. I have confirmed the names of six girls who hired her, but sources say the total is about a dozen. I tried again to get Loggans to confirm that in early 2019, asking if I’d be wrong if I reported “twelve.” She laughed—she’d seen All the President’s Men, too—and she just said “numerous” one more time.
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