Soulless

by Jim Derogatis

  State’s Attorney Dick Devine said the tape had been authenticated by the FBI Crime Lab in Quantico, Virginia, and experts there concluded it was not a forgery. “Sexual predators are a scourge on society. This indictment should send a clear message that illicit acts with minor children will not be tolerated in the community.”

  At the start of the press conference, an aide from Devine’s office had handed a two-page press release and a copy of the twenty-four-page indictment to every reporter. Abdon and I couldn’t believe it, but Reshona Landfair’s name had not been redacted. The names of underage victims and rape victims of any age almost always are withheld by law enforcement. Another reporter pointed out the error, and the panicked aide collected all the documents she’d just distributed, then rushed to make new copies with Reshona’s name crossed out with a black marker. I wondered if that would have happened with the name of a white girl from Lakeview or the North Shore suburbs.

  “As soon as we see Mr. Kelly, he’ll be placed in handcuffs. We’re not going to treat R. Kelly any different than anybody else,” Chicago Chief of Detectives Phil Cline said. He announced that a warrant had been issued that morning for the star’s arrest. Then the officials took questions, most of them fielded by Lieutenant Robert Hargesheimer, head of the Special Investigations Unit.

  Many of the questions from our fellow journalists—who hadn’t seen the tape—centered on what it showed. “We’re not going to comment on that,” came the reply again and again. The same response greeted queries about whether the fourteen-year-old victim was cooperating in the investigation. After ten minutes, I couldn’t keep quiet, though Abdon elbowed me that I shouldn’t say anything to tip off our competitors. “We can ask later!”

  Ignoring him, and with my Sony Pressman cassette recorder rolling, I asked if anyone at the podium knew whether the girl and her family had signed a nondisclosure agreement with Kelly. “I am not aware of that,” Lieutenant Hargesheimer said. I said the Sun-Times had reported that Kelly was accused of statutory rape in three civil lawsuits by underage girls, that he’d settled those claims by paying the girls in exchange for nondisclosure agreements, and that he’d married Aaliyah under a falsified Cook County marriage certificate when she was underage. Was the state looking into the possibility of charges in those cases? “Our investigation, what we’re talking about today, deals with the tape,” Hargesheimer said.

  Now Abdon piped up. “In the general law, is it harder to prove a sex-crimes charge than a child-pornography charge?” State’s Attorney Devine replied that “it depends on the evidence that we have. We take each case as it comes.”

  I posed the last question before the press conference ended. Given that the tape was widely available for sale across the country, did Kelly face federal charges? I asked. Devine grinned and said, “You’d have to ask the U.S. attorney about that.” Abdon did, several times in the coming weeks, and a spokesperson for U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald declined to comment. In the years since, I have heard that federal authorities wanted to take over the case, but Illinois prosecutors did not want to cede it to them.

  Abdon and I rushed back to the newsroom, where Don Hayner already had three of our colleagues working on sidebars. Annie Sweeney wrote a story headlined “Tower Records Pulls Kelly Porn Tapes.” They had still been selling the one I bought there on DVD, R. Kelly: Bump & Grind “You Be the Judge,” which showed the scenes with Montina Woods and the other partner neither we nor law enforcement ever identified. (The retail chain was not selling the Reshona tape.) Another story led with “The Rev. Jesse Jackson warned Wednesday against rushing to judgment against R. Kelly.” The famous activist told reporter Julie Patel, “There are other greater issues in the world.”

  Mary Houlihan interviewed people in the street, quoting three women and one man who said they weren’t surprised by the charges. She also talked to programmers at Chicago radio stations. Dance-pop-oriented B96-FM pulled Kelly’s music from its playlist, but the station only played his big pop hits, and he didn’t have a new one at the moment. The three top R&B stations kept the singer in heavy rotation. “He’s innocent until proven guilty,” said Marv Dyson, general manager of both WGCI and V103.

  Over the past two days, at my editors’ request, I’d written a contextual story on famous cases of pop stars and underage girls. These included Elvis Presley and his fourteen-year-old bride, Priscilla Beaulieu; Jerry Lee Lewis and his thirteen-year-old second cousin and third wife, Myra Gale Brown; Led Zeppelin’s Jimmy Page, who first had sexual contact with Lori Maddox when she was fourteen; and Marvin Gaye, who met Janis Hunter when she was seventeen and married her after divorcing his first wife, Anna Gordy. (Hunter later claimed Gaye abused her and forced her to participate in threesomes against her will.)

  None of the infamous cases charted in my story can be excused, and there are plenty of others, but Kelly’s behavior was of a different magnitude. “The groupies of the golden age who have gone on to write their autobiographies and become famous are pretty different than a fourteen-year-old girl who is being urinated on by a thirty-five-year-old man,” then–New York Times music critic Ann Powers told me. And the girl on the tape was not the only one Abdon and I had written about.

  After the press conference, I started writing the main story about the indictments for page one while Abdon made calls to nail down the details of an AP news alert. Kelly had been arrested in Polk County, Florida, shortly after 4 p.m. EST. In addition to the new mansion he owned in Olympia Fields, Kelly rented two vacation homes in Davenport, Florida, thirty-five miles southwest of Orlando. He used one of the houses as a recording studio and hangout for his crew, while the second was home for his wife, Andrea, their children, and their nanny. Andrea was in the hospital, having just given birth to the couple’s third child, a son named Robert Jr.

  When Lieutenant Hargesheimer advised Florida officers of the warrant for Kelly’s arrest, Polk County sheriff’s deputies immediately went to his addresses in Davenport. They arrested him without incident while he sat in a van outside one of the houses. Deputies then led him in plastic zip cuffs to a substation in Winter Haven, where fifteen fans had gathered. “We love you, R. Kelly!” they shouted as reporters and photographers moved in. “I love you,” Kelly said. He turned to the media. “Not right now, guys.” He arrived wearing white Nike gym shoes, a blue Nike sweatshirt, blue sweatpants, and a denim bucket hat, Abdon noted.

  The arrest made headlines worldwide. Most of the stories reported that Kelly had been in Florida with his wife and children, the first time his family garnered widespread mention in the media. The AP talked to some of the neighbors in Davenport, who said Kelly hadn’t caused any problems, but full-time residents disliked anyone who rented rather than owned. “Next time, is it going to be a terrorist they let in here?” one homeowner asked.

  Abdon emailed me another paragraph of “color,” as my features-writing class in journalism school called it. “Kelly was issued the standard orange jail jumpsuit and placed in a private cell. He arrived too late for the 4:30 p.m. dinner.” I’d just finished adding that to our story when Hayner told us Ed Genson, the star’s new high-powered criminal defense attorney, had just called his second press conference of the day. Genson had not informed anyone from our paper about the first session, held not long after law enforcement’s presser at police headquarters. We later read in the Trib that the first time he met with reporters to assert Kelly’s innocence, Genson angrily vowed, “I’ll talk about the Sun-Times another day soon.”

  The copy desk extended our deadline, and Abdon and I hurried to Genson’s office in the Monadnock Building, an ornate sixteen-story tower in the Loop designed by celebrated architects Daniel Burnham and John Root. Genson’s dark, wood-paneled office had already filled with reporters when we arrived. The sixty-year-old attorney directed camera crews where to stand while he repositioned photos of his family on his desk to ensure they’d be seen on television. A source in the Kelly camp later told me the lawyer charged the singer $7
50 an hour.

  Portly, bearded, and bespectacled, with a famous mop of unruly, sandy-blond hair, Genson was called a mob lawyer by everyone on the Chicago legal scene. He embraced that description, telling AP reporter Mike Robinson, “I have no aversion to organized crime.” Genson masked a quick intellect and killer instinct with a bumbling, disheveled persona evoking Dostoevsky’s Porfiry Petrovich and Peter Falk’s Columbo. Suffering from dystonia, a neurological disorder, he sometimes rode a motorized scooter and sometimes limped with a cane. The cane now sat front and center, propped against his desk. “He told an interviewer years ago he deliberately used his disability to make jurors feel sorry for him,” Robinson wrote. “Now he says he didn’t really mean it.”

  Raised in Chicago courtrooms, where his father worked as a bail bondsman, Genson defended crooked politicians in addition to mobsters, but he said he tried to avoid sexual misconduct cases. “I just don’t like to be in a case where I have to cross-examine a woman victim,” he said. “I feel bad for them.” He and his close friend Sam Adam Sr. had nevertheless defended Rep. Mel Reynolds when the congressman was tried for having sexual contact with an underage campaign worker. Reynolds was convicted, and Abdon thought that debacle would have dissuaded Kelly, but the singer had hired Genson and Adam Sr. as soon as he learned indictments were coming.

  Genson thought he’d struck a “gentleman’s agreement” with the state for how his new, famous client would turn himself in. When the cameras started rolling, he railed about what he called “the grave injustice” of Kelly being arrested in front of his home while his wife and children watched. (Apparently, even Genson didn’t know Andrea was in the hospital with a newborn.) “Thirty-five years, and I’ve never had a state’s attorney do this when you offered to bring somebody in. We’re talking about a child pornography case where the person they’re alleging is the victim of the child pornography says it didn’t happen. I’ve never had an agreement like this breached. I don’t know whether it’s his race, I don’t know whether it’s his celebrity, but we were double-crossed!”

  I asked Genson if he was saying the girl on the tape told the grand jury it wasn’t her. The law requires that grand jury testimony remain secret, and he backtracked. “For the first time, I know who the victim is, and she said it didn’t happen.” I reminded him that Abdon had been asking him if Kelly had sexual contact with the victim for several weeks. “I’ve been reticent to talk about it because I didn’t think it was appropriate,” Genson said, changing the subject. “I’m not the one who put the victim’s name in the indictment. They did! It’s illegal, as I understand it.”

  Had the girl signed a nondisclosure agreement with Kelly? I asked. “No. I don’t even know what that is.” Genson ranted some more about the state not honoring the deal he thought he’d struck for Kelly to turn himself in, and he protested the steep bond of $750,000. “Any ordinary person indicted for child pornography would have been freed on a hundred-dollar bond or a two-hundred-dollar bond!” (I remember thinking, what kind of ordinary person is indicted for child pornography? But I didn’t pose that question.)

  Before the gentleman’s agreement fell apart, Genson said, Kelly’s spiritual advisor, the Rev. James Meeks, planned to drive the singer back to Chicago, because he hated to fly. Abdon and I hadn’t known about Kelly’s aviophobia before this. I asked for clarification, since the Sun-Times had reported that Kelly flew to Florida after the wedding with Aaliyah. Genson erupted. “Stop playing these games! Look, I’m a criminal lawyer, I’m not a press-relations person. You write your column about music! I’m talking about a criminal case and people who misrepresented themselves to me. As a matter of fact, and this is really gonna kill you, I’m sixty years old and I have no idea who Aaliyah is! Let’s talk about this case. She denies she was on the tape and denies she ever had sex with him!”

  “Wow, I didn’t know you could be such an asshole at press conferences,” Abdon said as we cabbed back to the Sun-Times. I told him I’d had a lot of experience back in Jersey.

  Kelly spent the night of June 5 in jail in Bartow, Florida, and Genson flew there to represent the singer in a Polk County courtroom the next afternoon. The star was led into court in an orange jail uniform, hands cuffed and moist eyes downcast. Judge Karla Foreman Wright agreed to let him return to Chicago on his own recognizance but warned, “You’re not to have contact with minor children not related by blood or marriage. Do you understand?” Kelly quietly answered, “Yes, ma’am.” Early the next morning, he and Genson flew into Midway Airport on the South Side aboard a rented private jet, then climbed into a silver Lexus.

  The luxury SUV pulled up to the Cook County Criminal Court building at West Twenty-Sixth Street and South California Avenue, part of the sprawling legal complex that also includes Cook County Jail, and which most Chicago reporters, prosecutors, criminal defense attorneys and their regular clients simply call “Twenty-Sixth and Cal.” When Kelly emerged from the Lexus in front of the waiting crowd of press, Det. Dan Everett of the Special Investigations Unit read the singer his rights, placed him in cuffs for the second time in twenty-four hours, and put him in the back of an unmarked squad car.

  Before he could post bail, Kelly had to be fingerprinted and photographed. He was taken to CPD’s Marquette District headquarters, “one of the police department’s Hill Street Blues–era relics from 1926,” Abdon wrote, “with marble stairs, mosaic hexagonal tiles, and not enough space for a celebrity, his legal team, his spiritual adviser, his spiritual adviser’s driver, and dozens of reporters and cameramen.” Kelly then returned to the courthouse to appear before a judge for his release on $750,000 bond. He paid with seven hundred and fifty hundred-dollar bills.

  Kelly smiled on his way out of court and told reporters he looked forward to proving his innocence. Standing at his side, Reverend Meeks said he was counseling and praying with the singer. They’d discussed “turning the direction of his music around, looking at other themes other than sex,” Meeks said. Then they climbed into the silver Lexus and drove to Salem Baptist Church in the Pullman neighborhood. There Kelly sang for fifty children and their parents at a kindergarten graduation ceremony. Apparently, the Chicago Tribune reported, “The no-associating-with-minors stipulation applied to the Florida bond only.”

  The star continued singing over the next few weeks, hunkering down at Chicago Trax. In early July, Jive Records rush-released a single, “Heaven, I Need a Hug,” after Kelly first gave it exclusively to WGCI. Elroy Smith, the station’s program director, told me that within ninety minutes of its first airing, it became the station’s most-requested song. The lyrics take the form of a letter to Kelly’s dead mother, Joann: “Ever since you left, your baby boy’s been dealin’ with / Problem after problem, tell me, what am I supposed to do?”

  Over a mid-tempo groove with lush orchestration and a guitar part credited to Reshona’s father, Greg Landfair—after playing on three of Kelly’s albums, this would be his last named appearance on the singer’s recordings—Kelly takes aim at disloyal former associates and the press: “Get rid of them clowns and get myself a whole ’nother crew / Media, do your job / But please just don’t make my job so hard.” Finally, he builds to a climactic finale, repeated three times. “Heaven, I need a hug / Is there anybody out there willin’ to embrace a thug? / Feelin’ like a change of heart / And all I really need is a sign or a word from God / So shower down on me, wet me with your love.”

  Given the most notorious scene in the videotape, the so-called golden shower that became fodder for jokes and gossip soon after Abdon and I first reported on it, the last line of the song seemed bizarre. “I know Robert, and he knows exactly what he’s doing,” a former associate told me. “He’s smarter than everybody thinks, and what he’s doing is, he’s fucking with all of us.”

  CHAPTER 8

  VICTORY BY DELAY

  “I’m just looking forward to my day in court,” R. Kelly had told reporters after he paid his bail at Twenty-Sixth and Cal. In fact, Kelly and h
is team would do everything possible to delay that day for six years, a wait that broke the record in Cook County for the length of time between an indictment and a trial. Superstar careers have been ruined overnight by accusations far less disturbing and with much less evidence than the video, but the most successful and lucrative period of Kelly’s long career came while the charges of making child pornography hung over him. Meanwhile, threats real or imagined and a steady stream of cash settlements kept many who knew about his behavior silent. His lawyers racked up untold billable hours, and the judge assigned to the case seemed happy to accommodate them.

  The Cook County courts supposedly assign trials based on a lottery system, though sources in the legal world say the process sometimes seems to be rigged. His fellow jurists appreciated Judge Vincent Gaughan’s eagerness to hear the “heaters,” the long, stressful cases that got the most public scrutiny. Who needs those headaches? In Kelly’s trial, the fix for Gaughan was in from the beginning, five sources told me, because he sought and reveled in the attention. “He said repeatedly in the run-up to the R. Kelly trial that his primary concern was for a ‘fair trial’ and other concerns were ‘secondary,’” the Chicago Tribune’s Steve Schmadeke wrote, but my sources said the judge consistently “bent over backwards” for the defense. He was, in a word, starstruck.

  Gaughan thought of himself as a star, too, if only on the Chicago legal scene. Like attorney Susan Loggans, he kept a thick file of his press clippings that he proudly showed reporters who visited his chambers. He didn’t grant on-the-record interviews, and he refused to speak to me for this book, but he did enjoy attention from journalists he chatted up at his favorite watering holes near Twenty-Sixth and Cal. He also stood out among his peers for employing an assistant who acted not only as an administrator, but essentially as a publicist, regularly reaching out to the press about upcoming happenings in his boss’s domain.