In another story, the Trib described Gaughan as “an animated jurist known for having a short fuse.” Over beers at the Billy Goat Tavern, a different Trib reporter preferred “surly fucking nutcase.” A much kinder man than many of his peers (or me), Abdon Pallasch called Gaughan “a kook.” By the time the judge pulled the Kelly case, my partner had known him for more than a decade. Once, when Abdon had to work but his two youngest sons had the day off from school, he brought them to court. “After the hearing,” he recalled, “Gaughan calls out to me, ‘Abdon, is that your family?’ and makes me bring the boys back into his chamber, where he gave them each veteran pins.”
Actually, those were what the judge called “Son of Gaughan” awards. He gave them out twice a year. A member of the team that prosecuted Kelly got one, too. “He didn’t ask me, he told me, ‘I want you over here.’ He has a whole gathering for it. I was awkward about it, but I could never go on record saying that. I managed to cover my contempt for him as we were in there doing the trial. And I manage to cover it to this day.”
“The luckiest day in R. Kelly’s life was when Gaughan took his case,” a legal source told me. Yet another agreed, maintaining, “I couldn’t put it any better.”
Born in 1942 and raised by Irish immigrants in the Lincoln Park neighborhood on Chicago’s North Side, Vincent Gaughan graduated from the University of Illinois in 1964 and enlisted in the army. While Chicago cops cracked the skulls of yippies, antiwar activists, and reporters alike during the 1968 Democratic National Convention on orders from the Boss, Mayor Richard J. Daley, Gaughan concluded a four-year tour of duty with the artillery in Vietnam. He made second lieutenant and earned a Bronze Star. Returning to his old bedroom in his parents’ three-story wood-frame house, he resumed the education he’d put on hold to serve his country and enrolled at DePaul University’s College of Law.
Around 3 a.m. on April 25, 1970, agitated after a minor traffic accident and a fight with the other driver, Gaughan locked the door of his third-floor bedroom. The twenty-eight-year-old veteran then began firing his M1 Garand service rifle through the window, Bill Mullen reported in a Tribune story headlined “A Viet Hero Arrested as a Sniper.” Vincent’s father said his son suffered from “nervousness,” or what might now be called post-traumatic stress disorder. Two bullets shattered the neighbors’ bedroom window, lodging in the wall above their bed, and they called the police. As they talked to two patrolmen in their dining room, two more shots came through that window, narrowly missing the officers.
Police swarmed the Gaughan home. Vincent shouted down from his barricaded bedroom that he wanted to talk to a priest who was a friend of his, the vice president of DePaul. Father John Richardson arrived and began to climb the stairs. “I know him well. He wants to talk. He won’t hurt me,” Father Richardson told police. Suddenly, Gaughan called down again. “Wait, I want a policeman to come, too. An Irish sergeant.” According to the Tribune, “That broke the tension. The policemen smiled, and the guns went down.” A classic Chicago case of white privilege, it is impossible to imagine the same outcome—then or now—in the black neighborhoods of the city’s South and West Sides for a young man firing a rifle at police.
The outcome of the case is unclear. Gaughan was charged with four counts of aggravated assault and weapons violations, the Tribune reported, but a Freedom of Information Act request filed by dogged Chicago Reader reporter Steve Bogira came up empty when he tried to determine the resolution of those charges. “They seem to have just ‘disappeared,’” Bogira told me, and I had no more luck than he did.
Whatever the resolution to the charges, they did not derail Gaughan’s life. After graduating from DePaul and passing the bar in the early seventies, he went to work as a public defender. Over the next two decades, he rose to serve as supervisor of the county office. In 1991, he was appointed to the bench by a panel of circuit court judges during the reign of Mayor Richard M. Daley, who inherited the still-considerable remnants of the political machine built by his father. Gaughan regularly won elections thereafter, because most judges in Cook County do. Few voters investigate the names further down the ballot, and they generally ignore stories like the one Abdon wrote in 1998.
Fresh out of journalism grad school, during his one-year residency at the Trib, Abdon reported that Gaughan was one of nine judges deemed “not recommended” by one or more bar groups. That year and every time he ran for reelection thereafter, the Judicial Performance Commission of Cook County praised Gaughan’s case-management skills but noted “criticism with regard to his temper, particularly as directed toward attorneys in his courtroom.”
With big jowls, a balding pate, and gray temples, Gaughan looked like a bulldog, with a default expression registering some mix of anger, sadness, and chronic indigestion. Many reporters and lawyers compared both his countenance and his demeanor to R. Lee Ermey, who played the drill sergeant in Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket. Some said the judge was much looser, jolly even, when he took off his robes, simply becoming “Vince,” and drinking with them in the bars after court adjourned. He was especially friendly with other Irish attorneys, my sources said, a network of “good old boys” rooted in the enduring Daley political machine.
Despite his background as a public defender and his own brush with the law, Judge Gaughan did not prove especially sympathetic to defendants. In 1993, at the end of his first high-profile trial, he sentenced a North Side gang member to thirty-two years in prison for the murder of a nine-year-old boy accidentally hit by gunfire intended for a rival. Three years later, he sentenced the ringleader of a group of five men to death for the murder of a South Side couple during a carjacking. His military background seemed to influence the fifty-eight-year sentence he gave a man who beat to death a Vietnam vet—“He had served our country and fought in one of its worst wars,” Gaughan said of the victim, “and all he wanted was to be left alone”—but a few years earlier, in his role as Cook County Commander of the American Legion, he sided against a Korean War veteran who charged racism when he was denied membership at the largely Irish Evergreen Park post two and a half miles from his South Side home and told to apply at an all-black post six miles away.
Gaughan presided over the sensational trials of two men who massacred seven employees at a Brown’s Chicken franchise in suburban Palatine in 1993, during a robbery gone horribly wrong. He sentenced one of the killers to death, and the other to life in prison. Those stood as the most prominent trials of his judicial career, until he drew R. Kelly.
Midway through the six-year wait for the Kelly trial to begin, Gaughan traveled to California at Cook County’s expense to study how Santa Barbara County Superior Court handled the media attention for another superstar’s sensational trial. Michael Jackson had been indicted for molesting a second young boy, thirteen-year-old Gavin Arvizo. Gaughan veered from the handling of that case in a significant way, however. Jackson was charged, tried, and acquitted all within fourteen months, Abdon wrote in a story five years after Kelly’s indictment, when his trial still hadn’t gotten under way.
“There’s no excuse for it, but this is a tried-and-true tactic when it comes to sex-crimes cases,” New England School of Law Professor Wendy Murphy told my partner. “Victory by delay.” Every day, Abdon said, the fourteen-year-old girl in the video grew a little older. By the time the trial finally started in May 2008, she had become a twenty-three-year-old woman. Jurors would meet a different person than the girl they saw on the video—that is, if she testified.
Some of the delays couldn’t be avoided. Gaughan needed time to recover after he fell off a ladder while changing a lightbulb in his home. Lead prosecutor Shauna Boliker took time off for the birth of her third son. Kelly suffered a burst appendix. But most of the long wait remains unexplained. Every few weeks for six years, usually on Fridays, Gaughan held regular status hearings, convening both the prosecution and the defense in his courtroom, then often immediately retiring with both teams to closed chambers. He sealed the records o
f almost all those proceedings. “He wanted to keep it very tight,” said Robert Heilingoetter, a member of the prosecution team.
Representing the Sun-Times, the Trib, the AP, and WBEZ/Chicago Public Media, First Amendment attorney Damon Dunn petitioned to make all Kelly court records public before the trial. Gaughan rejected the motion, and the Illinois Supreme Court sided with him. To this day, the voluminous record of much of what happened for six years before the opening of the trial, a lengthy docket that includes 168 entries with at least 50 motions by the defense and 56 court orders issued by Gaughan, remains sealed to the public. The only way it can be unsealed is with another legal challenge, and that could fail, too.
“How do I put this diplomatically? This record is a clusterfuck,” concluded a legal scholar who reviewed the docket at my request. “I couldn’t tell you exactly how many motions there are that he ruled on because I believe a good many of them are not noted. For all I know, some could have been withdrawn or ruled on in chambers. There is no way to know.” In 2018, Gaughan oversaw the trial of a white cop who shot a black teenager, Laquan McDonald, sixteen times in the back. He tried to conduct that trial the same way, but this time, Dunn and other media attorneys prevailed when the Illinois Supreme Court scolded Gaughan for “patently unconstitutional conduct.”
Much of what happened during the six-year wait for the Kelly trial was procedural. The star had to apply for the court’s permission every time he wanted to travel out of state, and Gaughan continually gave his blessing. More problematically, sources told me the judge consistently sided with the defense’s contention that prior bad acts should be excluded in any attempt by prosecutors to show propensity, although exceptions do exist to that general rule. In other words, Gaughan ruled as inadmissible any evidence not directly related to the videotape. In the interest of fairness and not prejudicing the jury—noble ideals, to be certain—the judge would allow no testimony about the allegations in the four civil lawsuits filed by Tiffany Hawkins, Tracy Sampson, Patrice Jones, and Montina Woods; Kelly’s illegal marriage to Aaliyah; or payments from Kelly to the Landfairs. Jurors would learn very little about the video being part of what the Sun-Times had called a pattern of predatory behavior and payoffs. It became an isolated crime.
“Any proof of other crimes in terms of a sexual crime against a minor wasn’t coming in, because he wasn’t charged with that, even though, you know, that’s the extenuation of what our facts did say,” a member of the prosecution team later told me. “He reprimanded us on many occasions in terms of any bend in any of the extraneous facts toward that.”
In a rare public ruling issued in February 2004, a little more than a year and a half after Kelly’s indictment, Gaughan granted a motion by the defense to drop seven of the twenty-one counts against the singer because they cited outdated language prosecutors took from a law the Illinois Supreme Court had declared unconstitutional. Kelly still faced fifteen years in prison if convicted on the remaining fourteen charges of making child pornography, but the ruling gave everyone following the proceedings an early indication that the judge viewed the state’s case with skepticism.
The star had another stroke of good fortune in the Florida courts. In June 2002, when Polk County sheriff’s deputies arrived to arrest Kelly on the warrant issued in Chicago, they were especially thorough within the bounds of the law as they understood it. While Kelly sat wearing zip cuffs in the back of a squad car, officers searched his two rented vacation homes. One was the house where a nanny stayed with Kelly’s two older children when Andrea was in the hospital with her newborn. The other was where Kelly recorded music and partied with his crew. During a search of the “party house,” officers found a digital camera wrapped in a towel inside a duffel bag behind a bedroom door marked “Private, Do Not Enter.”
Seven months later, Florida police said the camera included twelve images of a naked underage girl, the same fourteen-year-old in the video in the Chicago case. In three of those images, she was having sexual contact with Kelly, and in others, she was engaged in a threesome with him and a legal-age woman, according to Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd. I later learned the woman’s identity, but it has never been revealed, and she did not speak to me.
Kelly had traveled to Florida in January 2003 to film the video for “Ignition (Remix).” After he spent a long night on set at the South Beach nightclub Mynt, Miami-Dade police arrested him outside Coconut Grove’s Grand Bay Hotel. A warrant had been issued in Polk County charging Kelly with twelve additional counts of possession of child pornography, stemming from the search of his Florida party house. Sheriff Judd told Orlando Sentinel reporter Susan Jacobson that it took seven months to arrest Kelly on the new charges only because “we needed to make sure the i’s were dotted and the t’s were crossed.” Each count carried a maximum five-year jail sentence, and Judd didn’t rule out additional charges for the legal-age woman in some of the images.
A Florida attorney for Kelly posted $12,000 bail, and the thirty-six-year-old singer walked out of jail three hours later. “At this point, it looks to us like a classic case of piling on,” said Kelly spokesman Allan Mayer. “There is nothing new here.” Prosecutors disagreed, but in March 2004, a Florida court abruptly shut the case down. Judge Dennis Maloney ruled the digital images were inadmissible because they’d been illegally obtained. Officers had no probable cause to search Kelly’s Florida homes for child pornography, Maloney said, even though they were executing a warrant for Illinois indictments on making child pornography. Polk County dropped the charges.
Kelly greeted this incredible stroke of good fortune as if it had never been in doubt. “My faith in our system of justice has never wavered, and with this victory behind me, I look forward to clearing my name in Illinois,” he said in a statement released by Mayer. “I am confident that when all the facts come out, people will see that I’m no criminal.”
Metaphorical songs about cars, women, and sex had long been a trope in pop music, and Kelly had already gone to the well once. “You remind me of my Jeep, I want to ride it,” he sang in 1995. Eight years later, he took things to an absurd and cartoonish new level with “Ignition (Remix),” scoring the biggest hit of his career. “No more hopin’ and wishin’ / I’m ’bout to take my key and stick it in the ignition,” he sang over a hard-driving club groove building to the call-and-response choruses—“Can I get a toot, toot? / Can I get a beep, beep?”—and inspiring everyone at the party to bounce, bounce, bounce.
Jive Records released Kelly’s seventh album in February 2003, eight months after his indictment, and Chocolate Factory debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard albums chart. The lead single, “Ignition (Remix),” hit No. 2 on the Hot 100 and spent almost a year on the chart. “It’s an anthem,” Kelly told Chris Heath of GQ. “Some even want to call it the national anthem. I don’t agree with that, but I’ve heard it so much.”
The album sold more than two million copies and spawned another Top 10 hit and much-loved anthem with “Step in the Name of Love,” a tribute to Chicago’s stepping scene of primarily middle-aged black couples dressing to the nines for a night of mid-tempo line dancing. Both songs became ubiquitous at backyard barbecues, house parties, family reunions, and weddings throughout the South Side and around the world.
Many fans seemed to have dismissed Kelly’s charges, or decided they didn’t care and could separate the art from the artist. Critics wrestled with that problem, but only halfheartedly. “R. Kelly’s problems start less than thirty seconds into Chocolate Factory, when he coos, ‘Anything you want / You just come to Daddy,’” Anthony DeCurtis wrote in Rolling Stone. “From other R&B lovemen, that would be boilerplate pillow talk, but allegations of participating in child pornography against Kelly provide a distorting filter through which his music will be heard for years to come. That’s too bad, because Chocolate Factory ranks among the best work of his career.”
Pondering the singer’s success in the wake of his indictment, New York Times Pop Life columnist Neil Strauss ask
ed, “So how has Mr. Kelly pulled this off? He has done it, more or less, by seeming to ignore his legal problems and releasing hit after hit. . . . These are songs that should be on the radio, and Mr. Kelly has found a solution to bad press that even the most expensive publicity agent on earth can’t give a client: to excel at the craft that made one a celebrity in the first place.” (Strauss would go on to a much more checkered career after the Times, writing two books about what he called “the secret society of pickup artists” and “the seduction community,” and later seeking treatment for sex addiction.)
While promoting Chocolate Factory, Kelly adopted a new nickname: the Pied Piper. A mythical character of the Middle Ages, the Pied Piper worked as a rat-catcher. Hired by the town of Hamelin, Germany, he lured its rats out of their holes with his magic flute, then killed them. When residents refused to pay him for his services, he did the same to their children. Given the accusations against him, Chris Heath of GQ told Kelly that some people found the nickname troubling. The singer didn’t understand. “I started calling myself the Pied Piper when I started using the flute sound in my music,” he said, citing “Snake” and “Step in the Name of Love (Remix),” which includes the line, “Yeah, it’s the Pied Piper of R&B, y’all!”
When Heath schooled him on the legend, Kelly maintained that “I never ran into no story like that.” (“I do believe that he truly didn’t know,” Heath wrote.) “It’s kind of jokey to me,” Kelly added. “It’s goofy, because I don’t think enough people think that deep into me, they would compare me to some man that leads children out of the community and kills them. There’s no way they would buy my albums, there would be no way they would come to my concerts. Anybody that thinks that way is sick. So definitely can’t pay them no time.”
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