I did not make the gun analogy lightly. The night after the tape arrived, on January 5, 2001, my now-ex-wife and I sat with friends (who happened to be photojournalists at the Chicago Tribune) in the living room of our apartment in Lakeview, equidistant by a mile from Wrigley Field and Kelly’s home at the time in the converted Baptist church on George Street. The four of us shared a pizza, then popped a Blockbuster video of the Matthew McConaughey film U-571 into the VCR. When we heard a loud crash around 10 p.m., we initially thought the noise was from the movie, but it didn’t coincide with any depth charges exploding on-screen. We soon discovered it was something else entirely. Someone had shot out the window beside the front door to our two-flat.
Ashland Avenue always bustled with traffic, but we didn’t see any cars or pedestrians. My phone number and address were listed. “It was definitely alarming,” one of our friends, Tribune photo editor Robin Daughtridge, told Mark Caro of Chicago magazine years later. “It was like, ‘You’ve got to be careful, Jim.’ They had a young child. It was unnerving, for sure.” The Sun-Times paid to replace the window, but my editors and I decided not to report the incident to police. We didn’t know if there was a connection to our story; we didn’t want to become part of that story, and we didn’t want to be paranoid or melodramatic. It was also possible that it had been a stray bullet, though we lived in a safe, yuppie neighborhood where no one ever heard of errant gunfire.
This was not long after the mid-nineties shooting deaths of hip-hop superstars Tupac Shakur and Biggie Smalls. Many rappers and R&B singers posed as gangsters. I had talked to dozens of people close to Kelly, and to varying degrees, they all talked tough, reflections of the “R&B thug.” But were they really, or was it all fronting? I had never been eager to find out. The Kelly associate who rattled me most was, ironically, the beefy but bespectacled light-skinned accountant, Derrel McDavid.
When we discussed what we should do with the FedEx tape, Cooke advocated giving it to police from the start. Publisher John Cruickshank agreed. My gun analogy convinced Abdon, and he echoed it often in the years to come. Though Hayner still expressed doubts, he ultimately agreed, too, and so did the paper’s media attorney, Damon Dunn, and the head of the editorial board, Steve Huntley, its institutional conscience. CPD and the state’s child protective services had been investigating Kelly for several years, and the tape presented possible evidence of a felony. Most important, the female subject of the tape could be in harm’s way. As much as we didn’t want to become part of the story or cross an ethical boundary, we agreed this was the one-in-a-million exception.
Abdon called the Youth Division of the Special Investigations Unit at CPD. He handed Det. Dan Everett the original tape in its FedEx envelope when the investigator came to the newsroom. “You should have this,” Abdon said. He didn’t say anything more. We didn’t know any more about that tape, but Abdon wouldn’t have given him additional information even if we did. While the cops set off to do their job, we continued to do ours, but the Sun-Times did not report the first video until thirteen months later, in April 2002.
Through the first decade of a career in which he consistently topped the pop and R&B charts, the only association many fans made between Kelly and the word “video” was the slickly produced clips he crafted for his hit singles. It wasn’t until early 2002 that a different sort of Kelly video began to proliferate, via bootlegs sold on street corners across the country, as well as in some major record-store chains.
The most famous sex tape before then had been stolen in 1996 from the home of Baywatch star Pamela Anderson and her husband, Mötley Crüe drummer Tommy Lee. After a private detective hired by the celebrity couple failed to recover the video, and it began to be appear as a bootleg, Anderson and Lee sold the copyright to a website called Club Love and chose a company for an official release on DVD. “It made an estimated $77 million in less than twelve months,” Rolling Stone reported, “and that’s just on legitimate sales.”
A little more than a year after the first Kelly videotape arrived at the Sun-Times via FedEx, Abdon bought a video called R. Kelly Triple-X Sex Tape on VHS for $10 on a street corner in the Loop. A few days later, I purchased a video called R. Kelly: Bump & Grind “You Be the Judge” on DVD for $14.99 at Tower Records on North Clark Street in Lincoln Park. Both of us expensed the Sun-Times.
The front cover of the DVD I bought carried a “Parental Advisory Explicit Content” notice like the ones the music industry had begun to place on CDs with explicit lyrics a little more than a decade earlier. It featured a picture of Kelly, bare-chested except for a thick gold chain, with his head bowed in prayer. The back cover noted “©2002 Underground Entertainment.” The company, the copyright, and the South Loop post office box it listed all seemed to be fake when I checked into them. Along with four more photos of Kelly, the back cover also included some teaser marketing copy. “You heard about it on the news and everywhere in the streets. Now see it for yourself. R. Kelly’s Bump & Grind (and this AIN’T the music video). To say he’s a ‘Super Freak’ would be an understatement. Check out the multi-platinum R&B superstar live, raw, and in the flesh!”
Despite the different titles, the videos Abdon and I bought were identical, interspersing two different scenes of Kelly with two different women. The first was the brief scene from the first video we’d received at the paper. The second depicted someone we only identified after she became the fourth woman to file a lawsuit against Kelly, in May 2002.
Local attorney Donna Makowski sued Kelly on behalf of Montina Woods, a thirty-three-year-old Chicago model, actress, and dancer. It was the first lawsuit by a legal-age woman, and the first from an attorney other than Susan Loggans. In it, Woods claimed that during the summer of 1999, Kelly illegally and surreptitiously recorded her having sex with him in an office at his recording studio, Chicago Trax. She sought damages “in excess of $50,000” for intentional infliction of emotional distress and invasion of privacy. In addition to the singer, she named as defendants Trax studio, Jive Records, and Kelly’s accountant, Derrel McDavid, citing all of them for negligence in having “knowledge of the performer’s sexual misconduct and failing to act to prevent further harm to the public sector in securing any type of treatment for R. Kelly, who generated income on their behalf.”
At the age of thirty in 1999, Woods danced in Kelly’s stage shows, portraying the woman on the giant bed at the end of the concerts on the Get Up on a Room tour. She also toured as a dancer with his friend Ronald Isley, whom Kelly christened “Mr. Biggs.” By the early 2000s, the legendary leader of the Isley Brothers was the rarest of pop, rock, R&B, and soul superstars, having scored major hits in almost every decade—the fifties (“Shout”), sixties (“Who’s That Lady”), seventies (“Fight the Power”), and nineties, the latter courtesy of Kelly. Isley had guested on Kelly’s 1996 single “Down Low (Nobody Has to Know),” and Kelly had contributed to the Isley Brothers’ twenty-seventh studio album, Mission to Please. On that disc and in its videos, Ronald, then fifty-five, relished playing the role of Mr. Biggs, updating the gangster characters seen in vintage Blaxploitation movies for the hip-hop era.
Attorney Donna Makowski would not talk to Abdon about her client’s case, but he later learned that Montina Woods also settled out of court for an undisclosed sum in exchange for signing an NDA. Her lawsuit noted that the scene of her having sex with Kelly had been included on a video sold in Chicago, Atlanta, Los Angeles, Detroit, and New York called R. Kelly Triple-X Sex Tape—the same one Abdon had purchased.
The identity of the other girl or woman in those bootleg videos remains a mystery, at least to me. The police proved no more successful in identifying her than we had, though Abdon and I marveled at a curious fact an investigator later shared with us. An FBI expert had determined Kelly’s partner almost certainly was in her mid-teens, the investigator said, based on examining the images of the soles of her feet. We remain puzzled about how that worked, and we never connected with anyone who could enlighten us abou
t that particular forensic specialty. Two sources later told me the girl was not underage, and that she was “in your line of work,” as one said, a member of the media in another Midwestern city.
Woods accepted a settlement, and the other girl or woman may have, too, one of those sources suggested. If she was of legal age, the only crime may have been an unreasonable invasion of privacy. The scenes themselves were ultimately no more disturbing (or titillating) than most of the amateur porn clips that had begun to take up a lot of bandwidth in the early days of streaming video on the Net. But the video the Sun-Times received via FedEx set a precedent that held when we received a second, much more troubling and ultimately notorious tape.
PART II
CHAPTER 7
GO TO YOUR MAILBOX
The first Friday in February 2002, I planned to spend a long day working at home. Powering through on four cups of coffee after taking my five-year-old daughter to preschool, I spent the morning transcribing a phone interview with neo-soul singer Alicia Keys, who was returning to Chicago on a tour stop supporting her phenomenally successful debut, Songs in A Minor. “There’s always those two sides,” Keys said when I asked about the mix of praise and criticism she’d gotten for talking about how hip-hop sometimes disrespects women. “I just feel it’s time to show people how beautiful a woman is and how much she’s worth and how much she should be respected. There’s so much more than what’s kind of become the cliché of women in music.”
As the pop music critic at the Chicago Sun-Times, I spent a lot of my time writing feature previews of artists coming to town, as well as reviewing their shows. For important national or high-profile local artists, I wrote longer features for the Sunday paper, as well as reviewing albums every Sunday, and sometimes on Tuesdays when an especially anticipated release arrived in stores. I wrote obituaries of the greats on deadline—James Brown delayed my daughter opening her presents for a few hours on Christmas morning, 2006—and I reported or wrote commentary on news stories on my beat, from a stampede at the E2 nightclub on the South Side that left twenty-one people dead in 2003, to the corporate merger of Ticketmaster and concert promoters Live Nation, which sent the price of tickets soaring. Investigative stories about R. Kelly added to the usual workload for both legal affairs reporter Abdon Pallasch and me—rare was the week when each of us didn’t have half a dozen bylines on our respective beats—but sometimes you choose your stories, and sometimes they choose you.
After I transcribed the Keys interview, I wrote and filed the feature to run before her show at the South Side’s Arie Crown Theater. Then I dove into transcribing another phoner with Scotty Moore, the guitarist who’d been a sideman on the best recordings by Elvis Presley. My job was nothing if not musically diverse. I planned to get a jump on the deadline for writing that column when the phone rang. Annoyed and eager to be done for the day, I answered in practiced harried-journalist dudgeon. “Jim DeRogatis.”
“Go to your mailbox,” a gruff baritone commanded, then hung up.
I already expected—and dreaded—what I’d find.
Frustrated that we hadn’t been able to nail all the facts about R. Kelly and the girl he called his goddaughter, Reshona Landfair, the first story Abdon Pallasch and I published in the Sun-Times a few days before Christmas 2000 made no mention of that relationship. Only one sentence even hinted at its existence. “Chicago police twice have investigated allegations that Kelly was having sex with an underage female but dropped the investigations because the girl would not cooperate.”
Six weeks after the first story ran, Abdon and I each got a letter, cc’d to editor Michael Cooke as well as the paper’s media attorney, Damon Dunn. Writing on behalf of his clients, Greg and Valerie Landfair, and their daughter, Reshona, Chicago lawyer Daniel H. Touhy cited that one sentence: “The natural and obvious implications are false and defamatory. The fact that the Landfairs are not identified by name in your article makes no difference. It is well-known in their community that Robert Kelly is a close friend. Demand is hereby made upon you to immediately cease and desist.”
The letter mentioned Reshona’s name four times, and misspelled it twice.
Rather than worrying anyone at the paper, we thought the letter confirmed we’d been on to something. Kelly himself never threatened to sue the paper for any story Abdon and I wrote—ultimately, we would share thirty-three bylines between 2000 and 2008—and his camp never even demanded a correction or a clarification. We didn’t learn anything else about Kelly’s relationship with Reshona until shortly before the next Christmas, on December 19, 2001. (The Kelly story had a way of ruining my holidays.) Sparkle called me this time, her voice shaking and fraught with emotion.
“When you talked to me last year, I couldn’t say anything, but I’ve since gotten proof. This is not a rumor, this is something that I totally seen with my eyes. I got a phone call on Friday stating that there was a tape surfacing with my niece, and I know you can’t publish minors’ names, but I was just like, okay, is it true, is it true, is it true? So, two of my friends actually viewed the tape and know my family personally, so they knew it was my niece.”
During my reporting a year earlier, Sparkle hadn’t said much when I connected with her through a Motown Records publicist and asked about the relationship between Kelly and her niece Reshona. “I’m not her parents or whatever.” Now, she continued, a man had come to her apartment claiming to represent a Chicago attorney named Buddy Meyers. He gave her the lawyer’s card, and then he showed her a videotape. What she saw left her disgusted, horrified, and enraged. She said the man left with the tape, and she didn’t hear from him again, but she began making phone calls, telling people what she’d seen. She asked her brother to call their sister. Sparkle had been estranged from Valerie and Greg Landfair since she’d told them to keep their daughter away from the star after she split with him.
Next, Sparkle called the Illinois state’s attorney’s office. She didn’t know exactly who to ask for, and wound up talking to the deputy supervisor of felony review. She took notes during these calls, and she carefully spelled the name of the man, Robert Heilingoetter. Years later, I talked to Heilingoetter, now retired. “I worked murder cases, not sex crimes, but I took Sparkle’s cold call. I remember she was speaking very cryptically. ‘Well, what if I had this, and what if I had that, and can’t you do something without?’ And I’m like, ‘Well, if what you’re saying is true, you have to come forward. And we’d have to see this tape.’”
Next, Sparkle called the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services, where she spoke to a woman named Kim. She didn’t catch her last name. Kim told Sparkle the same thing. The office could only act if it had a copy of the tape.
Finally, Sparkle called me. At first, I thought she might have seen the first tape that had been sent to the Sun-Times via FedEx eleven months earlier, but she described a much longer and more disturbing video. She believed her now-seventeen-year-old niece Reshona appeared in the scene with Kelly when she was fourteen, based on her hairstyle at the time. “The horrible thing about this tape is he’s doing some things to her that I know it had to have been going on for a long time. The most demeaning thing on the tape is that he’s pissing in her mouth and, excuse my language, nutting in her mouth. Telling her to pucker up her lips. She’s a young girl, so he’s just brainwashed her to death. Something needs to be done.”
I called William “Buddy” Meyers first thing the next morning. “I have no idea why they threw my name around. I’m not involved with R. Kelly right now or anybody connected with R. Kelly right now.” The attorney kept a low public profile, Abdon said, though Meyers also had been one of the owners of the Chicago Wolves American Hockey League team since its inception. Sparkle told me she believed that whether or not the man who showed her the tape was connected to Meyers, he did it to confirm the girl was Reshona and that she’d been underage in the clip, probably so he could blackmail Kelly. The way Meyers said those last two words, right now, prompted me to keep qu
estioning. Have you ever represented anyone connected to Kelly? Will you? Do you have a videotape of Kelly in your office? Have you seen one?
“I don’t have a videotape. I’ve got some people I’ve talked to briefly, but nothing further. Right now, my firm has not been engaged with anybody having anything to do with R. Kelly. I’ve heard some scuttlebutt, but that’s all I’m at liberty to say right now.”
Through the holidays and into the new year, Abdon and I called all the sources we’d developed. As of the first week of January 2002, none of them had yet seen a tape with Reshona, though several had heard about “a new video on the streets.” We agreed with city editor Don Hayner: We didn’t have a story yet because we didn’t have a tape, but we kept making calls. Then, a month later, somebody called me.
“Go to your mailbox.”
I went to the mailbox beside the front door of the house I’d only recently purchased on Grace Street on Chicago’s Northwest Side and found an unmarked VHS cassette in a blank manila envelope. You have to be accessible if you’re a journalist, and even after the bullet through the window on Ashland Avenue, I’d made sure my home-office number and address were listed. I ran upstairs to my daughter’s bedroom, popped Toy Story 2 out of the VCR, put the unmarked tape in, tossed her beloved Jessie doll aside so I could sit on the edge of what she called her “big-girl bed,” and hit play.
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