Soulless

by Jim Derogatis

  Of the numerous claims Loggans has brought against Kelly, most have settled out of court. Her firm has filed only three lawsuits against the star. Sixteen-year-old Tiffany’s was the first. Sixteen-year-old Tracy Sampson’s was the second, and once again, Abdon and I reported it first in the Sun-Times.

  Growing up with a single mom in Park Forest, a mostly black suburb southwest of Chicago, Tracy masked her teenage insecurities with the self-confident drive and precocious attitude befitting a rapper. Tall and skinny with a long, pretty face and tightly wound braids, she got excellent grades in high school in neighboring Richton Park, and she graduated a year early. She enrolled in the music-business program at Columbia College Chicago in the South Loop. As a college sophomore, she wrote her own artist’s biography under her chosen stage name, Royalty.

  At the age of Nine years old, Tracy “Royalty” Sampson started writing her own songs. By the age of Twelve years old, Tracy discovered she didn’t just have a love for writing and arranging her own music, but also for all aspects of the music industry; especially performing and the promotions aspect as well. At the age of Thirteen Tracy decided she would like to pursue a career as a rap artist, but she wanted a stage name that defined her true personality. That’s when a friend came up with the name “Royalty” because she said “Tracy only wants the best in life”. By the age of Fourteen Tracy had arranged and co-produced her first demo tape. Tracy decided at the age of sixteen she had nothing in common with her peers, so her love for the music industry drove her to graduate from high school early (with honors).

  During her first year at Columbia College Chicago, the ambitious sixteen-year-old secured an internship in marketing with the regional office of Epic Records. There, Tracy reported to supervisor Cathy Carroll, a promotions manager who also did some work with R. Kelly, even though he recorded for a competing label. In April 2000, Tracy tagged along with Carroll to an “Expo for Today’s Black Woman” sponsored by Chicago radio station V103-FM at the Hyatt Regency Hotel near downtown’s Magnificent Mile. Kelly was appearing at the event, and Tracy dragged her friend Kelly W. along, too. They wanted to get the star’s autograph for another friend, Harriet, who couldn’t come because she couldn’t skip school.

  Kelly hugged Tracy when Carroll introduced them, and he started to put his phone number under his autograph on a head shot, until Tracy told him the signature was for her friend Harriet. Instead, Kelly scrawled his phone number on a small piece of cardboard and whispered in Tracy’s ear, “Call me.” Then he hugged her again.

  That night, Tracy called from her friend Kelly W.’s house, and Kelly W. listened in as the star invited Tracy to Chicago Trax, according to Tracy’s lawsuit and Kelly W.’s sworn affidavit. At the studio, the star played the girls two new songs, “Hold on to Me,” which later appeared on the soundtrack to the 2001 film Ali, and “True Baller,” released the same year as the B-side to the single “Fiesta (Remix).” As they listened, Kelly W. said, “Tracy made suggestions and criticisms that R. Kelly seemed to appreciate.” A member of his crew later told me the star couldn’t help but laugh. “This mouthy little bitch giving him advice on his mixes was pretty funny.” As one of his bodyguards sat chatting with Kelly W., the singer led Tracy by the hand to another room. According to her lawsuit, they kissed, and he asked her to masturbate him. She refused, so he masturbated himself in front of her.

  Although Tracy said Kelly scolded her when she arrived with friends, telling her never to bring anyone to the studio without first clearing it with him, she kept returning to Trax. She wanted to learn from the singer, producer, and songwriter, and her lawsuit included a long list of the mentoring lessons he gave her. “Robert Kelly told me about the right and wrong use of other people’s work [as samples]. . . . Robert Kelly told me to write the ‘hook’ of a song first [and] referred me to Jay-Z because he is a genius at hooks. . . . Robert Kelly looked at my demo package and critiqued it.” He also advised her against working with Eric Payton, who’d been MGM’s manager and who’d shown interest in signing Tracy.

  The sexual contact started within the first few weeks, and it lasted from the spring of 2000 until the fall of 2001, according to Tracy’s lawsuit. Abdon and I looked at each other in disbelief when we read that. Another affair with an underage girl who could not legally consent, and this one was ongoing even while we were doing the reporting for our first story about Kelly’s predatory pursuits.

  Tracy claimed in her lawsuit that she lost her virginity to the star at age sixteen. “I was lied to by him. I was coerced into receiving oral sex from a girl I did not want to have sex with. I was often treated as his personal sex object and cast aside. He would tell me to come to his studio and have sex with him, then tell me to go. He often tried to control every aspect of my life, including who I would see and where I would go. During our sexual encounters, he would make me do disgusting things like stick my finger up his butt. As a result of this relationship, I am seeing a counselor. I have increased stress in my life. I am afraid of trusting people. I get headaches whenever I see or hear Robert Kelly. I cry when I think about him and what he made me do.”

  Tracy later said that during sexual contact, Kelly often told her, “Tell Daddy how old you are.”

  The threesome especially upset Tracy, her friend Harriet said in her sworn statement. “Tracy was emotionally upset after she stopped seeing R. Kelly as well. She often felt disgusted with herself and would cry all the time.” The lawsuit included corroborating records about Tracy’s subsequent medical and psychiatric care, as well as dozens of pages of phone logs tracking the star’s calls to her. It also included travel records documenting the trip Tracy took with him to Tampa in January 2001 to attend Super Bowl XXXV. Kelly favored basketball over football, but the NFL invited him to the big game after he sang at the halftime show for that year’s NFC Championship two weeks earlier at Giants Stadium in New Jersey’s Meadowlands.

  Abdon never found notice of a settlement in Tracy’s case, but Loggans confirmed to us that several months after filing the lawsuit, Kelly paid her client in exchange for signing a nondisclosure agreement like the one that ended Tiffany’s claim. Years later, Geoff Edgers of the Washington Post reported that Tracy got the same amount as Tiffany, $250,000, presumably keeping the same two-thirds after Loggans’s legal fees and costs. Citing her concern for other girls entangled with Kelly and her frustration with how the star treated her, Tracy spoke to Edgers publicly for the first time. “He makes you feel like he’s a wounded puppy, like he’s hurt so deeply, that there’s good there, he just can’t get it all out. Being so much older [now], I see how wrong stuff was and how ultimately gross and pedophile-ish it was, but that’s something you have to have your adult brain process.”

  Tracy also told the Post that Cathy Carroll, the supervisor at Epic Records, fired her from her internship. “She told me I was a stupid bitch and I shouldn’t have talked to him.” Tracy gave up her dream of working in the music business, believing her reputation had been poisoned. Edgers talked to Carroll, who by 2018 had become a senior director of radio promotions and strategy for the gospel label RCA Inspiration. “Rob is really a good person,” she said. “I think he’s just troubled like a lot of these other artists are.” Tracy had been “star-struck,” Carroll continued. “A lot of these women who claim stuff, they put themselves out there like that, and then they want to turn around and sue people and sue men. A lot of times, it’s not really the men. . . . I just know that people who are artsy are kind of kooky, I guess. Different. But he has got a very good heart.”

  In their responses to Tracy’s legal filings, Kelly’s attorneys, Chicagoan John M. Touhy and Los Angeles–based Gerald Margolis, included a paragraph citing the star’s many charitable works as evidence of that good heart: “Kelly has visited schools to give talks to students regarding staying in school and other topics; he has participated in charity events to help provide food to children; he has visited hospitals to visit sick children; he has provided Christmas gifts t
o sick children; he has participated in religious meetings with children and others.”

  In the fall of 2001, Kelly also wrote a song called “Soldier’s Heart,” released as a single and dedicated to “the heroes of September 11.” He and Jive Records pledged that all proceeds would benefit the Army Emergency Relief organization and hospitalized veterans in the Chicagoland area. The dull, heavy ballad flopped, peaking at No. 80 on Billboard’s Hot 100, but it had a second life in the spring of 2003, during the United States invasion of Iraq.

  “Radio stations around the country are playing it around the clock,” read a statement from the Kelly camp written by his new publicist, Allan Mayer. A few months later, the star announced a concert at the Bell County Exposition Center in Belton, Texas, near Fort Hood, with all proceeds benefiting the Texas Military Family Foundation. I could find no records or follow-up stories of proceeds from the release of the single or ticket sales from the concert benefiting any military charities. When I asked a Jive Records publicist about how much they had raised, she could not give me a number.

  “Man, the only reason he ever gave anyone anything is he seen folks like Michael Jackson and Michael Jordan do it,” the former associate told me. “He thought that’s what he had to do to be big-time—that it would be good for business.” So Kelly didn’t really care about the troops? I asked. My source laughed. “Shit, man. Robert don’t give a shit about nobody but hisself.”

  In April 2002, Susan Loggans brought her third claim against R. Kelly on behalf of a new client, Patrice Jones, who said she began having sexual contact with the star three years earlier, when she was sixteen. For the first time, the Sun-Times, the Tribune, and other media outlets in Chicago all reported the lawsuit the day it was filed at Cook County Circuit Court. Kelly’s attorneys, John M. Touhy and Gerald Margolis, denied the accusations and vowed they’d never settle. “The cash machine is closed,” Margolis said.

  Kelly’s lawyers paid Patrice in exchange for signing an NDA eight months later, but once again, her lawsuit and interviews with other sources told a harrowing tale.

  Patrice’s story began at the Rock ’N’ Roll McDonald’s on the corner of North Clark and West Ontario Streets, in a stretch of downtown catering to tourists. After a long day at the Sun-Times in the spring of 2002, I walked seven blocks north and west to the massive, two-story, garishly decorated fast-food franchise. The Rock ’N’ Roll McDonald’s had been built in 1983, and it once held the distinction of being the chain’s busiest outlet in the United States. By 2002, the novelty had long since worn off, and it was notable primarily for higher prices for the same fare sold beneath all the other golden arches. (The chain finally tore down the musically themed restaurant in 2018 and replaced it with a new, supersized “green” one.)

  I bought a Diet Coke and intentionally sat at the third table from the left, facing the front door. I took in the smell of French fries and burger grease, the harsh neon lights making the bright yellow and red fixtures and plastic furniture glow, and the cheesy displays of music memorabilia and artifacts from the chain’s history—guitars, forty-fives, milkshake mixers, and vintage ads—most dating from the era when Ray Kroc opened his first restaurant in suburban Des Plaines in 1955. The place bustled with the usual mix of suburbanites, out-of-town visitors, down-on-their-luck city-dwellers nursing half-empty cups of coffee, and groups of three or four teenagers, sitting together, laughing, and sometimes singing along to piped-in pop songs blaring on the sound system, including the current hits “Foolish” by Ashanti and “Don’t Let Me Get Me” by Pink.

  No self-respecting musical superstar would step foot in this place, I thought, but I’d heard for months that R. Kelly came here often. He always sat at the third table from the left, facing the front door, in the spot I’d taken. He didn’t materialize that night, and I hadn’t hoped he would. I just wanted to see what he saw.

  Early in my career at the Jersey Journal, editors Pat Martinez and Margaret Schmidt taught me that sometimes you choose your stories, and sometimes they choose you. In either case, you’re not a journalist if you don’t follow them through to the end. Without visiting the Rock ’N’ Roll McDonald’s, Kenwood Academy, or Evergreen Plaza and the other shopping malls Kelly frequented, readers might not understand how disturbing it was to think of the star haunting these places, accompanied by bodyguards, looking to pick up girls in their mid-teens. More important, without meeting any of those girls, it may be impossible to feel the same empathy for what they told me about having their dreams crushed, finding themselves separated from friends and family, and sometimes being hurt to the point where they tried to harm themselves. I’d seen the scars—physical and mental.

  “I’m telling you about it hoping you will write about it and Robert will stop hurting the people he’s hurting,” the anonymous fax that started it all had read, but I wasn’t trying to “save” anybody. This was a story, and it had chosen me.

  According to Patrice’s lawsuit, around 11:30 one night in December 1998, Kelly was holding court with two of his bodyguards and a third friend at his usual table when she and her cousin entered the Rock ’N’ Roll McDonald’s. Patrice wore her hair in an elaborate bun that framed her pretty face, and she sported a full-length white silk dress and a big wrist corsage. She and Shareese, both high school seniors, had just come from their prom. Because their overcrowded CPS high school in the city’s South Shore neighborhood had staggered schedules with two graduation ceremonies a year, it held a winter ball at a banquet hall as well as a traditional senior prom in the spring.

  While their tuxedoed dates, Kareem and Keyon, waited outside in a rented limousine, Patrice and her cousin got on line and ordered cheeseburgers, fries, and sodas for four. Both fans of Kelly, the girls took a few minutes to recognize the man in the sloppy gym clothes staring at them. When the realization hit, they giggled and waved. R. Kelly smiled and waved back.

  One of Kelly’s bodyguards approached Patrice and handed her a balled-up napkin with a phone number written on it. The singer wanted her to call him, the man said, but she shouldn’t tell anybody. Ignoring those instructions, she and Shareese ran outside and gushed to their dates about who was hanging out at Mickey D’s. The boys went in to take a look, and they saw that the girls hadn’t been bullshitting. Seeing R. Kelly at the Rock ’N’ Roll McDonald’s was all anyone could talk about when the limo pulled away, but Patrice’s date didn’t find the encounter nearly as exciting as the rest of the group. He’d heard stories about Kelly’s appetites, and the singer had once tried to pick up his sister.

  An aspiring record producer, Patrice hoped to follow in the footsteps of Missy Elliott. A week after the prom, she called the number on the napkin. Kelly invited her to visit Chicago Trax so he could show her how the mixing board and the racks of recording equipment worked. Patrice was devoted to her grandmother Rosie, and they spent a lot of time together. In the months to come, Rosie often picked up the phone when Kelly called the house looking for her granddaughter. She didn’t approve when Patrice came home in a cab in the middle of the night, and she worried about what was going on at that studio.

  Although Patrice told Kelly she was sixteen, she said the sexual contact began shortly after they met and continued for nine months. When Abdon and I charted the dates on the timeline we’d begun keeping, the sexual contacts with Patrice came after those with Tiffany, Aaliyah, and “the girl in Miami” (who I later learned was Lizzette), but before the sexual contacts with Tracy Sampson. The five girls sometimes overlapped within a five-year period, and there were others still, including Tiffany’s Kenwood Academy classmate and the girl in Los Angeles from the video shoot. It was all getting very, very confusing—and overwhelming.

  Patrice’s lawsuit contained fewer graphic details than the claims Loggans’s firm brought for Tiffany and Tracy. It did say Kelly once had sexual contact with Patrice while another woman watched, and that Patrice had sexual contact with the singer at his studio, in several downtown hotels, and on his tour bus wh
en she accompanied him to New York for a concert at the Nassau Coliseum on Long Island. The lawsuit claimed Kelly sometimes gave Patrice gifts or small sums of cash, and once, a woman named Regina took her to Chicago’s Magnificent Mile luxury shopping strip along Michigan Avenue. “She is R. Kelly’s aunt that took me shopping at R. Kelly’s direction to buy clothes,” Patrice said. Kelly often called publicist Regina Daniels and her husband “Aunt Regina and Uncle George,” though they were not related. Regina was the spokeswoman I’d called for comment in the first story Abdon and I reported, the one who hinted that I should kiss her ass.

  In September 1999, at age seventeen, Patrice said she told Kelly she was pregnant. He insisted that she have an abortion, but she did not want to go through with it. The first time the bodyguard who gave her the napkin took her to Concord Medical Group on West Grand Street, she told the doctor she’d changed her mind and left, still allegedly carrying Kelly’s child. That night, the singer, a thirty-two-year-old married father with a two-year-old daughter, put Patrice up in a downtown hotel. When he visited, she said he exploded. She cried inconsolably, but he eventually convinced her to have the abortion, “through anger, threats, and then persuasion.” He also “began crying, stating that his career would be ruined.”

  The next day, the same assistant drove Patrice to see another doctor at the Family Planning Associates clinic on West Washington Street. She admitted she lied about her age when filling out the medical consent forms—still only seventeen, she claimed to be older—but she once again tried to avoid having the procedure, fleeing the clinic. The assistant followed, she said, and he dragged her back from a Chicago Red Hots stand a block away. He paid for the abortion with three hundred dollars in cash.

  The relationship ended less than three months later, in December 1999, but Patrice was crushed, according to her lawsuit and my other sources. In addition to pledging his love, Kelly promised to help launch her career, but they never recorded together. Once again, Abdon charted the legal proceedings though various motions, countermotions, and notices of depositions, until a sudden settlement in January 2003. The file never specified an amount for damages other than “in excess of fifty thousand dollars” for emotional and physical injuries, “embarrassment, shame, fear, and guilt over having had an abortion.”