Separating the myth from the music and discerning fact from fiction consistently challenged Abdon and me as we continued reporting on Kelly through the six-year wait for his trial. In February 2004, a year and a half after his indictment, we talked to one of his closest confidantes, a bright, passionate, thirty-nine-year-old mother of two. Kim Dulaney held a solid corporate job in environmental engineering and pursued a passion for writing children’s books during her off hours. She came to the Sun-Times wearing a stylish black pantsuit appropriate for any corporate boardroom, and we conducted a long and sometimes frustratingly opaque interview in one of the paper’s conference rooms.
Dulaney met Kelly at a Chicago dance club in 1990, and they’d been lovers for a while, she said. What she called their “physical intimacy” didn’t last long, because she knew he slept with a lot of women. “You could be fat, skinny; you could be old, young, whatever. He just loves women.” A close friendship endured after they stopped sleeping together, she said, lasting for thirteen years, until around the time of his indictment. Dulaney claimed (and other sources confirmed) that she was one of the few people in Kelly’s life with whom he shared his most personal secrets.
With his blessing, Dulaney published an illustrated children’s book called I Can Fly: The R. Kelly Story in 1998, and the star’s publicity machine helped promote it. Now, in early 2004, she’d just written and self-published a new book, Star Struck, which she called a “thinly fictionalized account” of their friendship. “His story is an amazing story, which is why this is so sad right now. I totally believed in Rob, as everybody around him does. Rob has a personality that’s magnetic.” But she told us she also believed he needed help for what she called his “sexual addiction.”
“There’s an element to my character that won’t allow me to lie,” Dulaney said, “so anything that I say to you, and anything I say in my book, is what I know to be true.”
In the pages of Star Struck, the narrator, Lela Valentine, is increasingly troubled as her best friend, an R&B superstar, loses control of his sexual impulses. His morals “twisted” by fame and money, “Ben” turns into the manipulative, sexually obsessed monster “Beemo.” As we talked, Dulaney referred not to her characters, but to Rob or Robert.
Abdon and I pressed Dulaney on two passages in the book that jumped out at us. The first involved a scandalous videotape. “It passed from the hands of a thief, through the hands of street chiefs, gang leaders,” the narrator, Dulaney or “Lela,” wrote. “Ben refused to deal. The tape slept with record-industry folks who had grudges against Ben. . . . Through a friend of a friend the tape managed to reach a journalist who’d written several stories on Ben’s troubles with women. I dared not call.”
Dulaney wouldn’t say anything more about the mysterious thief, gang leaders, or record-industry folks, though she did name the journalist. “I knew you were gonna do the story,” she told me. “I knew who you were from the beginning, and I was very, um, instrumental.” Instrumental in what, exactly, Dulaney wouldn’t say, though she did tell us she’d been friends with Sparkle. She’d seen Sparkle’s niece Reshona in Kelly’s orbit, though she never witnessed anything inappropriate. She’d watched just enough of the tape to be sickened and disgusted, however, and she told us she worried about Sparkle.
The other passage in Dulaney’s book that jumped out recounts a conversation between Lela and Ben after the videotape becomes public. Ben complains that the aunt of the girl in the tape is trying to destroy him, “like she’s possessed or something.” Lela can’t believe what she’s hearing. “Imagine if someone sexed your niece or daughter. I mean, I understand her.” Ben hesitated, “then struck the nail to seal the coffin,” telling Lela, “I need her done. You know what I mean? I can’t say it, in case it ever gets to trial I can say I didn’t say it, you know?”
No matter how many times Abdon and I asked, Dulaney wouldn’t say whether she’d actually had that conversation with Robert Kelly about Sparkle. “I wrote the book in fiction form so that I wouldn’t have to tell specific things that Rob said to me in confidence, and yet I would like to get the message across that we should be thinking critically about these issues.” Those in the black community defending Kelly saddened her—“To blindly support Rob does a disservice to Rob”—but she confirmed that some remained silent not out of loyalty but out of fear.
“They’re afraid of being murdered or something like that, because it is to protect a great moneymaking machine. I think they have good reason to be afraid, the same reason that I’m afraid sometimes, because you know that a person who is so consumed with saving something, they’re not thinking rationally. The people around them have all the money, so they can just pay somebody who has no respect for life and have something done to you.”
The author said she’d testify at Kelly’s trial if subpoenaed. “I wouldn’t lie for him.” The last time she’d spoken to Kelly, in late 2003, she told him about the book, and she claimed he hadn’t objected. “He knows that the core of the book is true, and he knows that all of my efforts have been to try to save him, so if I wrote it, he knows that I’m not just being malicious. Basically, I’m still his friend. It would surprise me if he was even mad about it.”
Abdon and I had a hard time figuring out exactly where Dulaney stood on Kelly, so he finally just asked her, “Should Robert go to jail?” A quizzical look came over her face, and she took her time in answering. “I think he needs to go away, to be by himself away from the glare of stardom. What I’m saying in the book is that this guy is caught up, and his morals are kind of twisted now. I think he can’t tell the boundaries of acceptable behavior.”
In her book, Dulaney also wrote that Ben had videotaped Lela, shown the tape to friends, and humiliated her. Dulaney wouldn’t say if that had happened to her, either, but a few months after we talked to her, Abdon began following the story of yet another Kelly videotape, and I happily ceded that one to him.
On this tape, which we never saw, Kelly had sex with a Chicago woman in her early twenties, gospel singer Deleon Richards, according to the FBI. Richards had been a star since age five, and she held the distinction of being the youngest artist ever nominated for a Grammy. In 1999, she married Gary Sheffield, the Los Angeles Dodgers’ (later New York Yankees’) star outfielder. In mid-2004, a man from the South Side named Derrick Mosley used the video in an attempt to extort $20,000 from Sheffield, the FBI said.
Sheffield had known his wife had had a relationship with Kelly before they met, and he shut down the attempted shakedown by going to federal authorities. He also released a statement to the New York press: “We will not be blackmailed. I will not have my family be dragged through the mud and filth. I have not seen the alleged videotape, nor do I care to. I love my wife and I vow to stand by her through any trial or tribulation.”
Derrick Mosley had become a community activist after attending Kenwood Academy with Kelly. He led protests on behalf of the victims of the stampede at the E2 nightclub, and he frequently spoke to the press to condemn gang violence. His own lawyer called him “a poor man’s Jesse Jackson.” When Kelly was indicted in 2002, Mosley told Abdon he was hired by Jack Palladino, a high-profile private investigator working for the star. “He spread good PR on Kelly and bad PR on Kelly’s critics,” Abdon wrote. “Mosley appeared on talk shows on black radio boosting Kelly, until he became convinced that Kelly did what prosecutors claim.”
For months, Mosley regularly called Abdon with tips about Kelly. They rarely panned out. After our first big stories in 2000 and 2002, we both got a lot of those kinds of calls, letters, and emails, and they rarely proved legit. We’d report them out, waste a lot of time we didn’t have, and wind up with nothing to publish.
In early 2006, a federal court in Chicago convicted Mosley for attempting to extort Sheffield and his wife, and the judge sentenced the poor man’s Jesse Jackson to more than two years in prison. Mosley kept calling Abdon from behind bars. The activist turned convict talked about Kelly scandals as ye
t unreported, promising to tell all if he won his release on appeal, or maybe if Abdon added a little money to his commissary account. My partner finally stopped accepting the collect-call charges whenever his phone rang from prison. There seemed to be no end to the weirdness surrounding Kelly, and we couldn’t escape it, even if fans and the music industry largely ignored it.
CHAPTER 9
RECENT UNPLEASANTNESS
While living in his $5 million mansion in Olympia Fields and recording in the new, state-of-the-art studio he’d built in his basement, R. Kelly proved more prolific than ever. Only a year and a half after Chocolate Factory, he returned to the charts with Happy People/U Saved Me, a double album with one disc of stepping music and another of more gospel-oriented tracks. Released in August 2004, two years and two months after the indictment, the album sold three million copies. Robert Christgau gave it a D+ in the Village Voice. “His productivity isn’t exuberance, it’s greed; his PG rating isn’t scruples, it’s cowardice. Happy People only gets steppin’ when it flaunts his wealth, only achieves consciousness on a closing diptych that observes, ‘We’re so quick to say God bless America / But take away “In God We Trust” / Tell me what the hell is wrong with us?’ Nice segue, Mr. Accused, right into the gross God-pop of U Saved Me.”
The self-appointed dean of American music critics never gave Kelly a free pass, but many others paid mere lip service to the charges against him while rushing to heap lavish, fawning praise on his newest sounds. It infuriated and sickened me. Like the critics I most emulated, Lester Bangs and Roger Ebert, I believe we always should consider the context of the art, and we can’t ignore or forgive significant moral wrongs at its core—racism, sexism, misogyny, homophobia, or worse. I once had a long talk with Ebert about Triumph of the Will. No critic should praise the work of groundbreaking director Leni Riefenstahl, he said, without giving equal consideration to the evils of the Nazis she depicted so gloriously. Bangs wrestled with the question of separating art and artist constantly, and not always successfully. A lot of my peers either didn’t care enough to think that deeply, or didn’t see Kelly’s actions as fundamentally wrong.
“Kelly makes like the life of several parties,” David Browne wrote in Entertainment Weekly. “Given the allegations against him, Happy People feels either clueless or arrogant, yet there’s no denying that Kelly knows record making.” In Rolling Stone, Jon Pareles wrote, “Kelly is the master of the ultraslow groove, and the songs on U Saved Me take their time, then use gospel’s strategic buildups to sweep Kelly toward faith. . . . ‘After I’ve been so bad, O Lord / How did you manage to forgive me?’ he groans. It’s gospel testifying, not courtroom testimony, but where Happy People only exercises Kelly’s technique, U Saved Me adds some heart.”
I had a much harder time hearing the heart, or separating the art from the artist’s misdeeds. Granted, both the art and the story had become personal. I’d met women who told me how Kelly hurt them, and I’d received the horrifying and disgusting video that got him indicted. Yet Kelly had flouted his obsessions in his music since “(It Seems Like) You’re Ready” on 12 Play and the title track of Age Ain’t Nothing but a Number, arguably boasting about his behavior in much of his music, on albums as well as in concert.
A month after Happy People/U Saved Me arrived in stores, Kelly set out with Jay-Z on the revitalized Best of Both Worlds tour. Overshadowed by Kelly’s indictment in 2002, their collaborative album topped out at sales of a million copies, not inconsiderable, but disappointing for the hyped pairing of two superstars. The artists reportedly never worked in the same studio, instead shipping tracks to each other, and critics savaged the result as a merger driven by marketing rather than inspiration and mutual admiration.
Nevertheless, eleven months after his celebrated “retirement party” at Madison Square Garden, Jay-Z announced he’d return to the music world on a joint tour with Kelly. Unfinished Business, a second disc comprised mostly of outtakes from the first, would be released by Roc-A-Fella/Def Jam and Rockland/Jive midway through the forty dates, in late October 2004. Trying to determine what motivated the reunion after Jay-Z initially seemed to have turned on Kelly, canceling the first tour after the indictment, journalists got no comment from the stars’ labels, but one press rep bragged to any reporter who’d listen that the first two Chicago shows alone would gross $1.6 million.
“We both knew the real money could be made if we toured together,” Kelly says in Soulacoaster.
My friend Anders Lindall and I sat in the press box at the Allstate Arena in the Chicago suburb of Rosemont on opening night of the tour, September 29, 2004. I had asked the venue’s manager if we could review the concert from the perch up in the rafters where sports reporters covered games by the Chicago Wolves American Hockey League team and DePaul University’s Blue Demons basketball players. I didn’t want to use our reviewers’ seats in Section 103 by the stage because I didn’t want to be recognized by anyone in the sold-out crowd of more than eighteen thousand people. Ardent fans who still loved and supported Kelly had been sending me hate mail and leaving angry and sometimes threatening voice messages since the first Sun-Times story in December 2000. I didn’t want to encounter any of them, and I certainly didn’t want the artist or his crew to see me.
Neither Anders nor I could believe what we saw. The show started with videos of matching black tour busses speeding to the gig from opposite directions, but a phalanx of Chicago cop cars followed Kelly’s. The singer spent very little time together with Jay-Z onstage. Instead, they alternated individual solo sets. During Kelly’s first showcase, he flashed a personals ad on the giant video screens. “Looking for a girl. MUST be down for anything. She’s got to be at least”—the scroll paused for a beat—“nineteen years old.”
The audience laughed uneasily, and later, it delivered only scattered applause when Kelly sought sympathy by complaining about “so-called family and friends” who betrayed and lied about him. “Not only will I continue to give you all what you want,” he vowed, “I will continue to give you all what you need.”
The strangest moment on opening night came when Kelly selected two supposedly random women (actually planted dancers) from the crowd and seduced them into his prop tour bus. They reemerged clad in orange prison-style jumpsuits, feigning a wild threesome in a barred cell that appeared center stage during an extended instrumental. A native Minnesotan more prone to saying “you betcha” than cussing, my tall, thin, fair-haired friend Anders asked, “Can you fucking believe this?” He was not alone in posing that question, or in interpreting the scene as I did. “Kelly re-emerged in a prison cell simulating sex with two writhing women,” Greg Kot wrote in the Chicago Tribune. Kelefa Sanneh of the New York Times flew to Chicago to review the show, and he held that during the threesome scene, Kelly “resembled either a shackled prisoner or a caged zoo ape. Dismayed fans were left to sort out this collision of stereotypes themselves.”
Anders had been my intern, transcribing interviews when I wrote my Bangs biography, and he’d gone on to freelance music reviews for the Sun-Times afterhours from a more reliable day job. He handled the straightforward critique. “It should have been bigger than the War of the Worlds, the Clash of the Titans, and Godzilla vs. King Kong all rolled into one,” he wrote, “but the pair couldn’t escape the shadow of the elephant in Kelly’s boudoir.” My editors assigned me to provide context and commentary. Under the headline “R. Kelly Flouting His Foes,” I observed that the line between Kelly’s public art and personal obsessions had always been blurry. During the show, he referenced the charges hanging over him by alternately playing his alleged crimes for laughs, using them to evoke sympathy as a victim unjustly persecuted, or bragging that nothing would stop the Superfreak.
Ed Genson, Kelly’s lead attorney, took umbrage with my column and promptly faxed a letter to the paper. “Jim DeRogatis, Sun-Times rock critic, ran his interpretation of the message R. Kelly intended to deliver at his show. The article was incorrect.” He took speci
al exception to my description of the cell skit. “Apparently, DeRogatis is so focused on Kelly’s criminal case that he sees it everywhere, even in places it is not.” Kelly and the two female performers “danced not in a jail cell but in a cage.” The defense attorney didn’t bother to correct the Trib’s Greg Kot or Kelefa Sanneh at the New York Times. He targeted me.
Abdon Pallasch and I had always given Kelly every opportunity to comment, and if we tried three times and failed for any story, city editor Don Hayner didn’t publish until we tried a fourth time. The Sun-Times intended to publish the letter, but I objected to a sentence that took a shot at my punk band. Arguing that Kelly’s First Amendment right to express himself was the same as mine, Genson referenced lyrics in my band’s songs and photos on my website. I found that chilling. I had learned the Kelly camp hired private detective Jack Palladino to look into many of my sources, and I assumed they looked into me and Abdon, too.
Then there were the gangster affectations of some of Kelly’s crew. “I know you have a six-year-old daughter,” Kelly’s manager Derrel McDavid said apropos of nothing when he called me at home on a Saturday afternoon. He also told Abdon that he’d seen me with my daughter at the Old Orchard shopping mall in Skokie, and he’d wanted to beat me up. Abdon and I made a point of documenting these comments in memos to our editors.
“Jim: Don’t worry, you are right to be concerned about the personal stuff they’re trying to get at,” Cooke responded via email after I complained about Genson’s reference to my band. He cut that sentence but ran the rest of the letter verbatim as a thousand-word op-ed. Kelly’s crisis manager Allan Mayer moved it on the PR Newswire with the heading, “Sun-Times Publishes Column Refuting R. Kelly Critic.”
I had no love for Kelly and his crew, and as the Best of Both Worlds tour rolled on, it became apparent that Jay-Z and his camp didn’t, either. During one of his sets, the rapper included what some saw as a dig at his co-headliner. When Jay-Z paid tribute to fallen stars, he solemnly stood as images flashed on the video screens of the late Tupac Shakur, Biggie Smalls, and, to the biggest reaction from the crowd, Aaliyah. The Allstate Arena, where the tour started, stood less than a mile from the Sheraton Gateway Suites, where Kelly had married his underage protégé a decade earlier. At the time of her death, Aaliyah had been dating Damon Dash, who co-founded Roc-A-Fella Records with Jay-Z.
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