We never learned the amount Patrice received, but Loggans confirmed the payment had been made in exchange for another NDA.
“I don’t like going back into the past,” Patrice told Geoff Edgers of the Washington Post years later. “I feel like God is the judge. Man is not the judge. Everything that he’s doing, he’s got to pay for it. He’s probably already paying for it.”
None of the cases Susan Loggans took led to criminal charges against Kelly, though the statute of limitations had not expired for statutory rape charges in Illinois. The lawsuits also raised the possibility of federal charges, since they claimed Kelly traveled with the underage girls and had sex with them in six other states, as well as in Washington, D.C. In one of the most famous cases of underage sex in pop music history, Chuck Berry had been sentenced to sixty months in federal prison and a $5,000 fine for having sexual contact with a fourteen-year-old after traveling with her across state lines, violating the so-called Mann Act. He served three years in federal prison.
“You can’t turn these into criminal cases unless the girls are really dedicated to being witnesses, and they’re coming to me as a civil lawyer,” Loggans told me in 2002. “They’re coming to me saying, ‘I have a case against R. Kelly.’ They know all I can do is sue for money and damages. I’ve never done a criminal case in my lifetime.”
There are other ways to look at it. The girls Loggans represented were closer to being children than they were to legal drinking age, and they came from black neighborhoods with a long history of good reasons to distrust law enforcement. Word on the street got out after Tiffany, “go to Loggans,” and the attorney seemed to get results. She was a star like Kelly, and teenage clients may have been taken with that and quicker to trust her than the police. But after “brother needs help,” the phrase I heard more than any other while reporting this story was “I was stupid; I was a kid.”
Sponsored by Rep. James Robert Mann, a Republican from Illinois, the United States White-Slave Traffic Act of 1910 was passed by Congress as a tool to crack down on organized prostitution by outlawing the transportation of women for “immoral purposes” across state lines. More commonly called the Mann Act, early opponents attacked the law as overly vague, difficult to enforce, and racially biased. World champion heavyweight boxer Jack Johnson was one of the first men arrested for violating its terms in 1912 because of two separate relationships, one with a white sex worker, and the other with a girlfriend, also white, who later became his wife.
Chuck Berry, a key architect of rock ’n’ roll who recorded a string of groundbreaking hits for Chicago’s Chess Records starting in 1955, was arrested for violating the Mann Act four years later after he met a fourteen-year-old Native American girl, Janice Norine Escalanti, while she was doing sex work at a bar in Juarez, Mexico. She traveled with his band and, prosecutors said, had sex with Berry as the group toured the United States. Berry claimed Escalanti sold his merchandise when they were on the road, then he gave her “respectable employment” at his St. Louis nightclub. He said she only went to police after he fired her for doing a shoddy job. While he didn’t deny that they’d shared a bed while on tour, he said he never knew she was underage.
An all-white jury convicted Berry in March 1960. A federal appeals court overturned the verdict, citing disparaging racial comments by the judge, but federal prosecutors tried and convicted Berry again a year later. He emerged from prison in 1963 and scored several more hits, but his career never fully recovered. The sounds of the British Invasion overshadowed his new music, and his famously bad attitude didn’t help. Where he once was playful and easygoing, Berry had become distant, bitter, and mercenary. “Never saw a man so changed,” said his fellow rock ’n’ roll pioneer Carl Perkins. “I figure it was mostly jail.”
The list of pop stars and underage girls never ends. In February 2019, a shaggy-haired, twenty-six-year-old singer and YouTube sensation named Austin Jones, from Chicago’s western suburb of Bloomingdale, pleaded guilty to coercing six underage girls to send him sexually explicit videos in which they stripped and performed sex acts to prove they were his “biggest fan.” Though U.S. District Judge John Lee has yet to sentence the singer, he faces a minimum of five years in prison.
Before February 2019, R. Kelly had only spent a few hours behind bars before posting bail for charges that were later dropped or of which he was acquitted. When I’m asked how that is possible, one of the reasons I come back to is the attorney who struck “numerous” civil settlements, accepting payments in exchange for NDAs rather than encouraging her clients to press criminal charges. During my nearly two decades of reporting about Kelly, Susan Loggans has given me only two significant interviews on the record. In both of them, I asked her views about the girls she represented.
“There are two aspects to this,” Loggans said in 2002. “They don’t look at it negatively when it’s happening, they look at it as a positive thing, that R. Kelly is their boyfriend. It’s not until later when he dumps them and then they try to get a job in the music industry that they realize that they’re blackballed. They get older and realize that they screwed up and they fell for it. It’s like any young girl feels when she gets dumped by a guy. At that point they start telling people, ‘Look at this bad thing that happened to me,’ and when they come to us as a civil lawyer, there’s no benefit to them to bring a criminal case.”
In early 2019, as the #MeToo and Time’s Up movements brought newly intense scrutiny to men who abuse their positions of wealth, fame, and power to sexually assault women, I didn’t think that comment had aged well. Loggans agreed to speak to me for this book, and I read her that quote and asked if she stood by it. “Yep, that’s true,” she said. Then she reminded me she had a degree in psychology and wondered why I was still pursuing the R. Kelly story.
“I mean this in the nicest way, Jim, but in one way, your life has been poisoned by this whole R. Kelly experience, because it’s occupied an emotional component of your life. . . . I’m sure it traumatized you, even if you’ve repressed it.” I don’t feel repressed, nor do I think Loggans is correct about the diagnoses she offered for some of her clients (some of whom she admitted she never even met in person). “Look at Fifty Shades of Grey. I really believe there is an inherent desire of a lot of women who are in fatherless homes to have someone who is stronger than they are.”
Loggans sees three complicating factors to the Kelly saga. One is that laws about underage sex are “very two-sided. . . . I mean, most of these kids in high school are having sex with one another, and many of them are fifteen. Legally, they’re committing a felony.” Two, “there’s also really a feeling that a lot of these girls lied about their age . . . and the laws are so fucked-up anyway, that why should you, you know, worry about a legal definition?” Finally, Loggans said, regarding legal-age women she said contacted her about Kelly but who she chose not to represent, “The word ‘kinky’ has a different definition for everybody, okay? Most people I know think that if you’re urinating on someone, that’s gross, including me. But you know, whether somebody thinks a ménage à trois or with four people or whatever, if they’re consulting adults, that’s not for me to judge. . . . It’s not okay with R. Kelly with adults? I’m bothered by that, even though I’ve gotten all this money from this guy.”
Loggans is concerned about the many legal claims recently filed against powerful men. “It’s not going to be long where we’re going to see the pendulum swing the other way against the whole #MeToo thing. I feel bad for my legitimate clients, who are eventually going to have a hard time getting a fair jury trial because there’s been so much bullshit prosecution out there. And that really bothers me.”
Me, I think that just like people have different definitions of “kinky,” people are bothered by different things.
CHAPTER 6
TROPHIES
During the fourteen months that followed the first Chicago Sun-Times story about R. Kelly in December 2000, no other local or national news organization forward
ed the reporting Abdon Pallasch and I had done. Activists in black communities across the country, especially women, protested the singer in many forums, their voices amplified in later years by social media. Some columnists—again, mostly women—frequently and effectively criticized the star, but the only news stories competing reporters ran were items following our revelation of the lawsuit filed by Susan Loggans on behalf of Patrice Jones. Kelly seemed to be Teflon.
Abdon and I were shocked and disappointed, given how many people had talked to us. It wasn’t hard to find sources with serious, disturbing stories to tell about the singer, especially in Chicago. In our hometown, Abdon partly blames “Tribune arrogance” and the famous rivalry between the Sun-Times and its competitor. “It was our scoop, so they ignored it, just like they did with the hired-truck scandal,” he says, referring to our paper’s investigation revealing that the administration of Mayor Richard M. Daley awarded no-work contracts in return for bribes and campaign contributions. The Trib only reluctantly covered that story after the mayor broke down in tears on live television.
My partner also reiterates that almost all of the city’s legal affairs and investigative reporters were white, and they didn’t understand the black community, much less the music world. But arrogance and ignorance didn’t excuse the national media. Conversations with many black colleagues made me think that if Kelly’s alleged victims hadn’t been black, the story would have gotten much more coverage.
“One white girl in Winnetka and it would have been different,” said my friend Mark Anthony Neal, a scholar of African American studies and critic of popular culture at Duke University. A white girl from the wealthy white suburb who was seduced by a man visiting her high school choir class, who had underage sexual contact and was coerced into acts with others at age sixteen, would have been major national news, even without the celebrity angle. (In all my reporting on Kelly before early 2019, I heard of only one relationship with a white partner, in the summer of 2017, when Anna Merlan of Jezebel spoke to a legal-age white woman who had what she called a “very controlling” relationship with the singer.) When eighteen-year-old Natalee Holloway disappeared on a high school trip to Aruba in 2005, it received incessant attention on cable news and in print. Similar examples abounded.
I was particularly saddened that many in the music press continued to review Kelly’s albums and concerts without even mentioning the accusations we’d reported. Maybe they didn’t consider themselves journalists; maybe they viewed their jobs as critics very narrowly, only writing about the music, or maybe, like that editor who’d chastised me for my columns about Michael Jackson, they didn’t want to “upset the readers” by noting charges of underage sex in their music reviews.
Were people actually going to have to catch Kelly in the act of hurting some girl before taking the accusations seriously?
In Soulacoaster, R. Kelly talks about his fascination with taking Polaroid photos of a sexual encounter he had watched at age eight. From the start of my reporting, several sources told me he was fascinated with technology, and he always loved to have the latest high-tech video gadget. Two of them said he documented his sexual encounters and carried the tapes in a gym bag he kept with him at all times, only leaving it briefly in his tour bus or on the sidelines of the basketball courts in the high-end health clubs where he played with his crew. “There’s about four or five tapes out there, in different cities,” the former associate told me. “Literally got to be maybe thirty, forty copies of various tapes circulating.”
“When you riding on that bus, he shows certain tapes to people,” said Kelly’s friend and former road manager, Demetrius Smith. “He might show the ‘grown-up’ tapes, and then he’ll leave it on the bus. . . . He’ll underestimate people, and the next thing you know, they done took a couple of tapes.”
Another source, the only one who ever mentioned this, claimed Kelly had also recorded his sexual contact with Aaliayh, but those tapes had been destroyed.
Abdon and I interviewed several experts on criminal sexual deviance who told us predators often kept “trophies” to document or remember what they’d done. Several of them used the clinical term “ephebophilia” for the compulsion to have sex with adolescents, reserving “pedophilia” for the sexual attraction to prepubescent children. But Dr. Domeena Renshaw, who agreed to meet with us after she read our work, gave us the most insight into Kelly’s alleged crimes, and she used the word “pedophile.”
A tiny, grandmotherly professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Neurosciences at Loyola University, Renshaw is a South African immigrant who opened one of the first sex clinics in the United States, and she remained a giant in the field for more than forty years, until her retirement in 2009. Several things she said stuck with us. Pedophilia is a “tenacious, severe problem,” and while some of her colleagues said men who have sex with teens do so because their partners don’t have the experience yet to judge them, she believed no one could say for sure. “It’s almost as if the hard-wiring of the brain is wrong, but there’s been no technical research because it’s been defined in the United States as a crime since 1978.” She did say with certainty that pedophiles don’t stop, “short of putting them in jail, which is simply containing them. When they come out, they will risk four years back in jail for four minutes with another young girl.”
Dr. Renshaw added that she was struck by Kelly’s brazen public behavior, a contrast to that of many pedophiles who operated in the shadows. “You might wonder,” she said, “whether Kelly wanted to be caught. Maybe it was an unconscious plea to ‘stop me.’”
On January 4, 2001, only fourteen days after we published our first story, a FedEx envelope empty except for an unmarked VHS tape arrived in the Sun-Times mailroom. Whoever sent it typed my name (missing the capital “R”) as both the sender and the recipient. They paid cash at a drop-off center, a FedEx spokesperson told us, and he couldn’t say exactly where it originated based on the tracking number, other than “somewhere in Los Angeles.”
Abdon and I watched the tape in the paper’s closet-size video room, where an editorial assistant recorded the evening newscasts to check for any important local stories the Sun-Times might have missed. The video showed a light-skinned black girl or young woman with long black hair kneeling on a pillow. Wearing only a white bra and panties, her bare feet faced the camera as she performed oral sex on Kelly, who seemed bored. At one point, he picked his nose, and he only took off his white sweatshirt midway through the two-and-a-half-minute clip. The singer leaned against a counter set against a wall of rough-hewn, light-colored beams, with a sink and a gold faucet to his right, a microwave to his left, and, just beyond that, a rack of what looked like six VCRs. Eventually, Kelly repositioned his partner with her buttocks facing the camera, apparently preparing to have intercourse, but the tape abruptly ended there.
We had no way of knowing who sent the tape; no immediate way of determining who Kelly’s sexual partner was; no time stamp indicating when the recording was made; and no way of telling the age of the girl or young woman.
The two of us watched the tape again a short time later with city editor Don Hayner and editor Michael Cooke in the latter’s office. We agreed with our bosses that it was hard to tell the age of Kelly’s partner—she may have been underage, or maybe not—and that unless we could determine the girl’s identity and prove she was an underage victim, we didn’t have a story. We spent twelve days trying to answer those questions.
At first, we thought Kelly’s partner might be the girl from the prominent family in the south suburbs who we never mentioned in our first story, but we couldn’t be certain when we compared her eighth-grade photo to the video. That family still wouldn’t talk to us. Judging by the photos we’d collected from her yearbooks at Oak Park and River Forest High School, we could tell the girl was not Reshona Landfair, the teenager Kelly called his goddaughter, according to the fax and the liner notes of TP-2.com. We also knew it wasn’t Tiffany Hawkins or Tracy Samps
on (nor, we later learned, was it any of the other girls who filed lawsuits against Kelly through Susan Loggans). The Sun-Times photo staff pulled a discreet headshot from the video, but none of the dozen sources we showed it to recognized the girl or young woman. We didn’t say why we asked.
Frustrated, we sat in a conference room two weeks later with our editors and the paper’s outside legal counsel for a conversation with long-ranging ramifications. What should we do with the tape?
Journalists do not get involved in their stories; they observe, and they report to the public. They do not do the work of law enforcement. Every reporter who’s ever taken an ethics class in journalism school has heard these ideals presented as absolutes. Abdon and I certainly did at Medill and NYU, respectively. Crystalline in their clarity, like most ethical dictums, they can lead to fascinating debates when you consider specific, thorny examples and ask whether there might be exceptions. Should a reporter witnessing a rape stand there and take notes, or try to help the victim by intervening or calling police? Should a photographer who sees someone fall on the tracks in front of an oncoming train shoot the scene, or try to pull the victim to safety? At what point does professional reserve end and moral obligation begin?
Neither Abdon nor I remember the conversation with our editors being especially lengthy or fraught with disagreement. As a Canadian who’d worked on London’s Fleet Street, the paper’s top editor, Michael Cooke, had a more activist, British-tabloid view of journalism. He had argued with us when our first story included quotes from sources who said Kelly needed help. “What he needs is to be in jail. He’s hurting people!” Having been to law school, Don Hayner represented the opposite pole, favoring caution and demanding fairness and balance, always. Abdon initially opposed any cooperation with law enforcement. “They do their job, we do ours,” he said. I presented a hypothetical. If someone left a gun in a manila envelope at the paper’s reception desk the day a fatal shooting made headlines, would we keep it or call the police to pick it up?
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