The twenty-six-minute, thirty-nine-second video seemed to have been shot in the same location as the first short tape we’d received, in the room with the rough-hewn, light-colored beams. Abdon and I had since learned that some members of Kelly’s crew called it “the Colorado room,” though most referred to it as the “log-cabin playroom.” It was located in the converted Baptist church he owned on George Street. More of the room could be seen in this new tape, including a huge pine-paneled hot tub. The video lacked a time stamp, but we later concluded it was made sometime in late 1998 or early 1999, possibly around the holidays. An unseen television played in the background, tuned to a new-music video program. “Let’s Have a Party Tonight” by the Backstreet Boys and “Too Much” by the Spice Girls could be heard, both big hits at the time, and the station aired a commercial for the Money Store, a lender specializing in sub-prime home-equity loans that had stopped using that name about six months after its sale in June 1998.
Much clearer and longer than the tape from FedEx or the bootlegged clip with the legal-age dancer, Montina Woods, this video started with a man I immediately recognized as Kelly sitting on a cushioned bench beside the hot tub, dressed in red sweat pants and a white T-shirt, seemingly checking the angle of an unseen camera. The tape cut out for a second, then returned as the man handed something—I couldn’t initially see what—to a fully dressed, big-breasted, short-haired girl with round chipmunk cheeks. I thought I recognized her, too, from the Oak Park and River Forest High School yearbook pictures Abdon had photocopied more than a year earlier. It was Reshona Landfair.
“Thank you,” she muttered, before she performed fellatio on Kelly, occasionally shooting glances at the camera. The video cut out again, then came back as she danced for him in and atop the ledge of the hot tub, following his directions—“Dance faster, baby”—now naked except for a big silver cross around her neck. At his prompting, she urinated on the floor outside the hot tub, then straddled him as he sat on the bench and they had intercourse. Seemingly double her size, he called her “Shona,” and she called him “Daddy.”
“Daddy fuck you?” he asked. “Yes, Daddy,” she said. The girl’s eyes had a vacant, disembodied look as she robotically followed Kelly’s commands, and her expression showed no signs of pleasure, or any emotion at all.
The tape cut out again before it returned with the girl lying on the bench next to the hot tub, performing fellatio again, then opening her mouth as Kelly urinated in it and over her breasts and stomach before fondling himself and ejaculating. There the video ended.
I hit eject, immediately got in my car, and drove the nine miles to the gray, barge-like Sun-Times building, walking straight into city editor Don Hayner’s office. He told me Abdon had just left. I caught my partner on his cell phone as he rode the Orange Line to Midway Airport for a flight to Denver and the rare splurge of a snowboarding weekend with college buddies and his then-fifteen-year-old son. “No shit,” Abdon repeated several times as I told him about what I’d seen. “No shit.” I watched the tape for a second time within ninety minutes with Hayner and my immediate boss, entertainment editor John Barron, in the paper’s closet-size video room full of VCRs and television sets. Hayner and I watched it again half an hour later with the top news executive, Michael Cooke, this time on the VCR and much larger TV in his spacious office with windows overlooking the Chicago River.
The Sun-Times had set a precedent—or crossed an ethical Rubicon, if you sided with those who criticized us—by giving the first tape to police, and we didn’t debate what to do now. Cooke and Hayner called Damon Dunn to inform him of what we’d gotten. Someone in the newsroom—I think it was Hayner, but he doesn’t recall—called the Special Investigations Unit at CPD and asked them to come to the office. I went outside and had a smoke, a nasty habit I’d idiotically picked up in the past year, at age thirty-seven.
Less than four hours passed between the time I found the tape in my mailbox and when Det. Dan Everett, Sgt. Debbie Chiczewski, and a third member of their squad buzzed the intercom at the glass doors between the elevators and the newsroom. John Barron and I met them in the hall and gave them the tape in the manila envelope, barely saying a word. The investigators left, then came back and buzzed again a few minutes later. “Was there a note?” Sergeant Chiczewski asked. “And is this the original tape you got?” We assured the officers there wasn’t, and it was.
A few months later, the Ethics Corner column of the journalism trade magazine Editor & Publisher harshly criticized us for these actions. Columnist Allan Wolper excoriated us and our editors, saying we “had forgotten for a moment that newspapers report to the public, not to the police.” Steve Rhodes also questioned the paper’s decision in his media column in Chicago magazine: “Several experts in media ethics say the action by the Sun-Times is dangerous, that there is a risk in a news organization’s becoming, to use a commonly invoked phrase, ‘an arm of law enforcement,’ jeopardizing its independence and throwing in with the prosecution.”
The Sun-Times responded in a column written by Michael Cooke and editorial page editor Steve Huntley, unanimously approved by the rest of the editorial board.
We think Rhodes and the critics are missing a few obvious and important points. First, no one subpoenaed or pressured the Sun-Times to give police the video. It was our idea. We did it voluntarily because while sources must be protected—otherwise no one would take their stories to a newspaper—the videotape was not a source; it was a piece of evidence in a criminal investigation that up to that point had been stalled. Second, we do not view crime indifferently. The video showed an adult sexually exploiting a teenage girl and urinating on her. Perhaps Rhodes and company should talk to a few parents to get a sense of this crime. . . . We agree that we are not a law enforcement agency. But we are citizens—not of some journalistic utopia, but of Chicago—and as such we try to both publish news and do our civic duty.
I never thought we did the wrong thing by handing the tape to police. Neither did Abdon, who was as sickened by the video as I was when he saw it on Monday. Hayner tried to clear the decks for both of us to spend as much time as necessary on the required reporting before we could write about the tape, but we needed to move fast. We didn’t know if any other news organization had it; we didn’t know how quickly the police would act, and most important, we didn’t know if the actions it depicted were ongoing with Reshona or any other young girl, although we certainly feared the worst.
Before the police arrived that Friday evening and entertainment editor John Barron and I gave them the tape, I made a copy in the paper’s video closet. Sun-Times lawyer Damon Dunn will groan when he reads that sentence, but it’s a fact. We had to do our job, to verify and report. After the cops left, I called Sparkle. Hayner had confirmed what I’d already known, that I had to show her the tape to determine if it was the one she’d seen and if the girl was her niece Reshona. Sparkle couldn’t come into the office until Monday.
That weekend was one of the longest of my life. I rehearsed as usual on Saturday at noon, playing drums with my punk band, Vortis, then took my daughter to the movies early that evening to see Monsters, Inc. I went grocery shopping on Sunday morning, then watched Super Bowl XXXVI, but only because I had to review the halftime show on deadline. (I hate sports.) U2 performed with a melodramatic and bombastic tribute to the victims of 9/11. Commenting on the televised music in broadcast spectacles like the Super Bowl and the Grammys ranked among my least-favorite tasks as pop music critic. Watching the video with Sparkle the next day stands as the hardest thing I’ve ever done as a journalist.
Early Monday morning, Sparkle walked off the elevator on the third floor of the Sun-Times a full-on diva, wearing a white fur coat over a glittery purple dress, sporting dark blue eyeshadow and bright lavender lipstick, her long blond hair flowing down her back. Uncertain about where to find me, the business reporter she met in the elevator led her to the desk I rarely used in the features department. Pop stars didn’t often come into
the office, and certainly not dressed as a cutthroat femme fatale. “Somebody’s here to see you, DeRo,” my colleague said. As we headed to the video closet, he silently mouthed, “Wow.”
While we watched the tape, which was indeed the same one the man who came to her apartment had shown her, Sparkle wasn’t a pop star or a diva. She was a worried and sickened twenty-six-year-old named Stephanie Edwards, who grew up singing in the church, and who’d seen her dream of a musical career recast as a nightmare. She trembled at times as she spoke. There were no tissues in the video closet, so when she began to cry, I pulled the handkerchief out of my left pants pocket and handed it to her. She laughed. It seemed like a very old-fashioned thing to do, but my stepdad always carried a handkerchief, and since I emulated him in many ways, so did I.
I’d had a woman close to me share her story of sexual assault before, in college. Then, I just listened. Now, I had to ask questions—it was my job—in a claustrophobic space, while the worst video I’ve ever seen played for us. I don’t think any actress could fake the emotion Sparkle showed about what she saw happening to “my heart,” her niece, or about the way it had torn her family apart. “I mean, the most horrible thing about the tape is when he’s relieving himself in her mouth and it’s . . . I can’t even fathom.”
Sparkle had introduced Reshona to Kelly when her niece was twelve, she reminded me, hoping he’d help her musical career. She clearly felt incredible guilt for that. She repeated that Reshona looked to be fourteen on the tape. Kelly was just shy of or had just turned thirty-two. “She doesn’t have her hair like that now. She wears braids now. And by this tape, it looks like she’s been doing it longer than fourteen. It’s definitely a plan, a script, she’s used to it, she’s like, ‘Now I have to do this.’”
Sparkle grew most emotional when talking about how Kelly handed Reshona money. “She is not a fucking whore!” I hadn’t noticed what Kelly gave her when I’d watched before, only that something changed hands. Sparkle asked me to rewind and pointed to the screen. Now I saw the cash. “You see that? He’s paying her money!” That thought made her furious, and she broke down, racked by sobs.
“He has to stop,” Sparkle said when she caught her breath. “There have been too many to count. They definitely had to be young. His whole MO, he stated this to me long ago, he likes them when they are ripe and young because he can mold them into what he wants them to be, and control their minds and make them do what women ‘should’ do. That’s what he thinks, you know, be a servant, be the ‘yes.’ She’s on there calling him Daddy! What kind of daddy would do this to their daughter?”
Of course I asked Sparkle who she thought brought me the videotape. She said she didn’t know. Journalists often say or ask something because they’re fishing for a reaction, or floating a trial balloon, if you prefer that metaphor. I said I thought Kelly’s ex-manager Barry Hankerson had to be angry about what Kelly had done to his niece Aaliyah. He was also disgusted by his former client’s compulsion to pursue underage girls; he’d asked his lawyer to confirm to me that he’d made that claim in his resignation letter. Did he steer the tape to me? “I don’t know,” Sparkle said. “I’m sure he would tell you. He’d have no problem telling you.” Hankerson never did.
After Sparkle left on Monday, I called John M. Touhy, Kelly’s Chicago-based attorney. As Hayner and Damon Dunn instructed, I told Touhy the paper had received a videotape apparently showing Kelly having sexual contact with an underage girl, and the attorney could come to the office to view it and comment. He declined. It was, Touhy later wrote, “an invitation that I was unable to accept at that time.”
On Tuesday, Abdon and I returned to the modest cream-colored stucco house that we’d first visited thirteen months earlier in Oak Park. A “village” of fifty-two thousand people, Oak Park is actually the twenty-ninth biggest city in Illinois, one of quaint storefronts and beautiful turn-of-the-century houses, including twenty-five designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, whose home and studio were there. It all provides a stark contrast to Chicago’s neighboring West Side, immediately across Austin Boulevard. Many of the stores that burned there during the 1968 riot still haven’t reopened, half a century later. Driving away from Lake Michigan through the West Side to Oak Park can feel at times like traveling from a postapocalyptic landscape to Main Street, U.S.A. in Disney World.
No one answered the door at the Landfair home on that trip or during our next two visits, the first on a relatively balmy thirty-degree afternoon, and the second that evening when the temperature had plummeted and we stood shivering on the doorstep. The family seemed to have left town. We later learned they’d gone to Europe, ostensibly for a tour by 4 the Cause, an R&B group comprised of Reshona and three of her cousins, but they stayed for several months. Reshona’s parents, Greg and Valerie, did not return our calls. They weren’t returning calls from family members, either, Sparkle said.
While racially and economically diverse, the student body at Oak Park and River Forest High School ultimately was as stratified as the neighboring communities. On Wednesday, I interviewed several of Reshona’s classmates, feeling decidedly creepy as I approached groups of girls carrying their backpacks and giggling when school let out. I found a trio who said they knew Reshona. She bragged about her friendship with R. Kelly, they said, and the student newspaper had published a photo of Kelly sitting in the bleachers watching her play basketball. The girls had heard about a video “on the streets.” They and other classmates I later talked to told me more about Reshona, a bubbly teen known for stopping and hugging friends in the halls between classes. She had as many white as black friends, and she was a good though not great student. She loved to listen to all kinds of music, shoot hoops, and hit North Riverside Park Mall after class, especially when the new Air Jordans arrived, so she could be first to wear them to school the next day.
Meanwhile, Abdon called a video expert. “Slim to none,” he said when Abdon asked about the possibility of fabricating such a tape. “Twenty-six minutes of putting someone else’s head on someone’s body, you’re talking about hundreds of thousands of hours of frame-by-frame manipulation to make that work.” (Digital video didn’t start to take off until the mid-1990s, and the ability to edit it on home computers only became widely available in the mid-2000s.)
On Thursday morning, I called Gerald Margolis, Kelly’s celebrity attorney in Los Angeles, and left a message that the Sun-Times sought comment for a story about his star client, an underage girl, and a videotape. John Touhy called me. “Any tape you have is a fake, and we find the timing of these events to be extremely suspicious,” Touhy said of the video he had declined to watch. Asked about the investigation, Touhy said, “I would imagine that the police will do their job.” Questioned whether he knew if Kelly videotaped his sexual encounters, he snapped at me, “I don’t think it’s any of your business.”
(After the Sun-Times published its first story about the tape, Margolis asked to see it, but the paper’s editors and attorneys said it had been a onetime invitation. In a letter dated March 1, Touhy wrote that that decision was “grossly unfair.” He also noted, “A videotape similar to the one described in the Sun-Times article has been available on an Internet site. The owner of that site . . . has been widely quoted in the press, and also personally stated to us, that the videotape he placed on the Internet is a ‘fake’ and that he put it on the Internet to demonstrate it is not Mr. Kelly.” Abdon and I watched that scene, and indeed, it was not R. Kelly. It also was not the video we’d received.)
By Thursday evening, Abdon and I had written the final draft of our story. It had been read by Hayner and the copy desk, vetted by Dunn, and laid out by the designers. Abdon, Barron, Hayner, and I gathered in a conference room with Hook and Crook, editor Michael Cooke and publisher John Cruickshank, and the top bosses read the page proofs. The story did not name Reshona or Sparkle; Sparkle had talked on the record, but identifying her would mean effectively identifying her niece, an underage rape victim. The story did reve
al for the first time that we had received another video a year earlier, the one that came via FedEx. “It appeared to show Kelly having sex with a different woman, whose age and identity have not been determined.” Based on what police told him that morning about the new tape, Abdon wrote, “Now, with the video, authorities tell the Sun-Times they are more optimistic about building a case against Kelly.”
At one point, Cooke stopped reading and pounded the conference table with the palm of his hand. “People do not want to read about urination in their morning paper!” The language had become more discreet and less specific with each draft, but I argued that we had to include the specific act. We have to let people know this is not a good-time, Tommy Lee and Pamela Anderson sex tape, I said. This is different.
Cooke conceded, but the sentence “The sex acts include intercourse, fellatio, and urination” only appeared in the thirtieth of thirty-six paragraphs when the story ran as the smaller of two on the front page on February 8, 2002, a week after I received the tape.
Chicago police are investigating whether R&B superstar R. Kelly—part of today’s opening act at the Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City—had sex with an underage girl and videotaped the illegal act.
A twenty-six-minute, thirty-nine-second videotape, which was sent anonymously to the Sun-Times last week, shows the singer-songwriter performing various sex acts with the underage girl.
“I’m that little bit of hope / When my back’s against the ropes / I can feel it / I’m the world’s greatest,” Kelly sang at the Olympics that day. The opening ceremony received the highest Nielsen ratings of any to that point, reaching an estimated seventy-two million viewers, according to the New York Times. Kelly belted out his new single from the movie Ali, another attempt at a rousing anthem like “I Believe I Can Fly,” complete with a gospel choir. The Olympics were a hell of a news peg, but the timing was accidental. The story was a complicated one, and it hadn’t been ready to publish a minute earlier.
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