Soulless

by Jim Derogatis

  Both legal teams held brief press conferences on the street in front of the courthouse. Looking sullen, State’s Attorney Dick Devine joined his underlings who’d done all the work. “As we must, we accept the verdict of the jury in this case. This prosecution is one we have no reservations about.” Devine added that the case had been unusual because the victim denied she’d been victimized, but “if we acquire the same evidence today or tomorrow, we will bring that case.” Lead prosecutor Shauna Boliker didn’t regret not subpoenaing the victim. “We were not going to re-victimize her.” She didn’t answer questions about whether the now-twenty-three-year-old woman had perjured herself before the grand jury.

  The state’s witnesses had all been courageous, Boliker said. “It was a difficult thing for them to do. They care about her. If we did anything with this prosecution, it showed the world how difficult this crime is to prosecute.” When a reporter asked if prosecutors thought Kelly would stop the behavior they tried him for, Devine said, “We hope people get a lesson from this and don’t think this is free territory for them now.”

  “Robert said all along that he believed in our system and he believed in God,” Kelly’s crisis manager Allan Mayer said, “and that when all the facts came out in court, he would be cleared of these terrible charges. But he did not expect that it would take six and a half years. This has been a terrible ordeal for him and his family and at this point all he wants to do is move forward and put it behind him.”

  Six months after that statement, the star’s divorce from Andrea became final, and Kelly saw even less of his family than he did before, his children later said.

  R. Kelly “was found not guilty because he had the best jury that Cook County could produce,” Adam Jr. declared. “Two things happened today: R. Kelly got his name back, and Reshona never had to lose hers.” (The trial made Adam Jr.’s name, as his father had hoped it would.)

  The Dean of Local Defense Attorneys Ed Genson cracked that he’d “graduated from late middle age to senior citizen on this case. Now I am going to get a little sleep.” (In March 2019, in a deathbed interview with Sun-Times columnist Neil Steinberg, Genson said, “I’ve represented entertainers, represented people connected to organized crime, represented professional criminals. I’ve represented guilty people, I represent innocent people.” Of Kelly, he declared, with punctuation and italics from Steinberg, “He was guilty as hell!”)

  Some of the jurors held a press conference, too, and they said that in their first poll, five members voted to convict Kelly. No one caved because they were just eager to go home, they said, though one of the alternate jurors later told me they’d all been agitated about the possibility of being sequestered over Father’s Day weekend. The biggest factor was they never heard from Reshona. Juror No. 9, the black Christian man who disliked seeing porn at 7-Eleven, initially voted guilty. “I thought it was R. Kelly on the tape. I still think that. What held me back was Reshona. I was eighty-five percent sure it was her, but it wasn’t one-hundred-percent, the way her childhood friends identified her.”

  “Neither side proved their case beyond a reasonable doubt, and that’s why we had to go for not guilty,” said Juror No. 21, the criminal justice student. No. 61, the Romanian immigrant, said he did not find the state’s witnesses believable. (Years later, in Surviving R. Kelly, he explained. “I just didn’t believe them, the women. I know it sounds ridiculous. The way they dress, the way they act—I didn’t like them.”) The jurors who spoke to the press seemed stunned when reporters told them about all of the evidence they hadn’t heard: the civil lawsuits, Aaliyah, the other tapes, the Florida photos, the pattern of behavior reported by the Sun-Times. “If they had presented it, who knows what we would have done,” one of them said in a tone that made clear they’d probably have voted to convict.

  Judge Gaughan didn’t speak to the press publicly, but in a bizarre footnote to the way he ran a trial he vowed wouldn’t become a media circus, he threw a party at a local tavern a week later. His assistant Terry Sullivan emailed invitations to the defense, the prosecution, court personnel, and all of the reporters who covered the proceedings. “Dress is casual. Come and celebrate the trial’s conclusion and everyone’s hard work.” My Chicago Public Radio colleague Natalie Moore told me, “It was a hoot. Everyone was loose and relaxed.” Edward McClelland also went and described the scene in Blender. “Gaughan was in the center of the room, in a wide-lapel suit with an American Legion pin. The judge cracked jokes with a reporter he’d kicked out of his courtroom and hammed for a buddy shot with an NPR correspondent, who posted the photo on her Facebook page. Sam Adam Jr. made his way to the bar for a free drink. Boliker chatted with journalists, most of whom had predicted Kelly would go down. Everyone seemed relieved that the trial was finally over.”

  I didn’t see what anyone had to celebrate. If the jury had acquitted a guilty man, the system failed and he might continue hurting young girls. If an innocent man escaped imprisonment, the state diverted resources desperately needed to prosecute other sex crimes while he’d been through hell for six years. At one point during the long wait, Boliker told Abdon, “I wish we could be done with this so we can get back to prosecuting real crimes.” We knew what she meant—she saw no end to cases that were the worst of the worst—and we didn’t think she minimized Kelly’s victims.

  The state expected the singer to take a plea deal—maybe a year or two in prison—count his blessings, and wise up. The defense and prominent members of the black community, including the Rev. Jesse Jackson and the Rev. James Meeks, according to my sources, told State’s Attorney Dick Devine that Kelly would take a different deal. “They wanted probation on this,” a member of the prosecution team told me, “and ultimately Devine made the decision that probation wouldn’t be appropriate.” In Soulacoaster, Kelly claims the defense urged him to accept a plea bargain for eight months in prison, worried that Van Allen’s testimony would lead to his conviction. “I’m not copping to nothing,” Kelly says he told his lawyers. “I got God with me . . . Just do the job I’m paying you to do.”

  The plea never came, the cash never stopped flowing to work the system, and God may or may not have intervened, but Abdon and I didn’t think Kelly would stop now that he’d been acquitted. As Dr. Domeena Renshaw told us, “Pedophiles will risk four years back in jail for four minutes with another young girl.” I felt sick to my stomach when I heard about Gaughan’s party, but not as ill as I felt when I learned the verdict in the newsroom at the Sun-Times. Don Hayner didn’t even have to say it when he hung up with reporter Eric Herman at the courthouse. I could tell by his look.

  The editors wanted me to write a piece with context and commentary, but for the first time in my daily-newspaper career, the words failed to come. I never felt like journalism and criticism mattered less. The deadline loomed, and Cooke hovered. The deadline passed, and Hayner hovered. The extended deadline loomed, and Hayner and Cooke sent Abdon over to hover. Finally, Cooke slammed my desk like he’d slammed the table during the argument about urination in the morning paper. “Damn it, DeRo, we have to have you in the paper. Get it done!” I finally sent seven hundred and sixty-three words to the copy desk.

  As any criminal-defense attorney will attest, “not guilty” doesn’t mean “innocent,” I wrote in a pathetically clichéd lede. I quoted Kelly, a line from “Been Around the World” on Chocolate Factory: “God gonna judge me / The same day He judge you.” Cooke wanted me to comment about the future of Kelly’s career, but I had nothing, so I quoted Kelefa Sanneh in the New York Times. “The sex scandal that threatened to derail his career in 2002 ended up doing the opposite. It made him more productive, more successful and, somehow—maybe because more people began paying attention to his excellent music—more respected than ever before.” I still wrestle with that.

  The day of the verdict, fifteen-year-old Jerhonda Johnson, one of the two regulars who attended the trial and called themselves “R. Kelly’s biggest fans,” talked to reporters. She gleefully
jumped up and down on the street at Twenty-Sixth and Cal. “They can’t call him a pedophile anymore,” she said. “They can’t say he likes little girls! They don’t have proof of that, because he’s innocent now, he’s free!” She could not have been happier.

  PART III

  CHAPTER 12

  “HOW OLD ARE WE TALKING?”

  On September 15, 2008, R. Kelly sat in a Philadelphia hotel suite with Touré, a music journalist and critic who’d written for the New York Times, the Village Voice, and Rolling Stone. He now hosted a BET show called The Black Carpet. Kelly wanted to do the interview in Philly, his crisis manager Allan Mayer told me, because three months after having been acquitted on all charges of making child pornography, the singer felt like Rocky.

  This was an important piece of media intended to relaunch Kelly’s career, though his album and concert-ticket sales had never faltered after the state of Illinois indicted him in 2002. Mayer fretted. The Kelly camp had chosen an interviewer they believed would be friendly, and they’d set some boundaries for the questions, but they worried because Kelly hadn’t prepared. The singer had spent the previous evening partying with his crew, and he brushed Mayer aside when the publicist wanted to work with him to rehearse talking points as they’d done before the Ed Gordon interview more than six years earlier. “No, I got this,” Kelly said.

  When the singer saw the cameras and lights the next day, he finally got serious. “Before the interview, he was so nervous he was shaking,” Touré recalled. The star’s handlers had asked to see the questions beforehand, “and it was clearly a condition of the interview.” Touré had readied about ten questions, and he turned them over, though he intended to follow the interview wherever it went once the cameras rolled. “They had all the power, until we started. Once we started, the equation totally changed.”

  His beard and hair neatly trimmed, Kelly wore a black leather jacket over a black T-shirt with white lettering. Things started out well, with both men all smiles. “You had a long tribulation, you came out victorious, you’ve gotta be feeling like Ali, like ‘I just won a big fight,’” Touré began. “Well, I just feel good, man, you know? Move on with my life,” Kelly replied. “Your music is amazing,” Touré told him, adding that Kelly was one of the geniuses of the era. “Like Marvin Gaye and Prince only, you’re able to do the spiritual stuff and the sexual stuff, and it works. I’m like, how are you able to work both sides of the listener that way?”

  Kelly took a second to ponder, as if considering this dichotomy for the first time. “I keep it real,” he concluded. “I grew up in church, and I grew up in the streets as well, so I’ve kind of got a bit of both sides in me. Which I believe we all do, in one way or another.”

  The flattery continued. “Over the last six years,” Touré said, “you’ve had this trial hanging over your head, but you’ve still been able to create great music.” How had he been able to do that despite “this personal pressure”? Kelly drew inspiration from difficulties such as the death of his mother and the trial, he said, and he found strength in his fans and family. Then Touré tossed a curve ball. “Do you like underage girls?”

  Mayer jumped in front of the camera. “No, no, no, you can’t ask him that!” Once again, Kelly brushed Mayer aside. “No, man, I got this, it’s cool. I wanna answer this.” Mayer sat down again. “Okay, you’re the client,” he said, and the interview resumed. (The first question and Mayer’s interruption would never air.)

  The interviewer posed the question to forty-one-year-old Kelly a second time, with a slight change in the wording. Because of Kelly’s reply, BET only aired the interview once. “The day after,” Touré told me, “Kelly’s people called and demanded it be shelved or they would sue. On what grounds? No idea, but BET shelved it.” (The clip floats on the Net, until unseen forces remove it, and then someone posts it anew.)

  “Let me ask you something real that millions of Americans are wondering about you,” Touré began the second time. “Do you like teenage girls?”

  Kelly, who’d been leaning to his left, sat up straight. “When you say teenage, how old are we talking?” The interviewer’s face registered almost comic surprise. “Girls who are teenagers,” Touré said. “Nineteen?” Kelly asked. Dumbfounded, Touré replied, “Nineteen and younger.” Kelly took a moment to consider. “I have some nineteen-year-old friends. But I don’t like anybody illegal, if that’s what we’re talking about, underage.”

  Touré tried one more time. “Some people think that you like underage girls. What do you say to them?” R. Kelly smiled. “Well, those people don’t know Robert.”

  Growing up thirty-five miles west of Chicago in suburban Streamwood, Jerhonda Johnson had heard R. Kelly’s music for as long as she remembered. He provided the soundtrack to her childhood, at birthday parties, backyard barbecues, even at church and in school. At age eleven in 2003, she became “a superfan,” thanks to “Ignition (Remix)” and Chocolate Factory. “My family listened to his music, my friends listened to his music, everybody was just in love with the music. I literally had every single CD he had released. It was just his music that, like, attracted me, and then everywhere I’d go, people were playing his music, so it was like nonstop Chocolate World.” When she wasn’t spinning Kelly’s CDs, she told me she blasted Chicago’s R&B radio powerhouse. “WGCI was the biggest supporter—they played him all the time—and it was my favorite radio station.”

  I first heard how Jerhonda met Kelly in January 2012, three and a half years after the verdict. Writing anonymously and in all caps, and noting that my father-in-law was a co-worker—the longer you live in Chicago, the more it becomes a very big small town—one of her relatives claimed to have “A GOOD STORY.” Eventually, the correspondent gave me Jerhonda’s contact info, and we traded a dozen emails and texts over the next five years before she trusted me to tell her story publicly for the first time.

  Throughout the trial, Jerhonda had been one of the two supporters who attended Cook County Criminal Court several days a week. “R. Kelly’s Biggest Fans,” the media called them. “I had never experienced a trial in person, and they have this big R&B star whom I really like, and I just wanted to experience it.” She told reporters she was eighteen, but she was really fifteen. Doe-eyed, with a slight build, chubby cheeks, long black hair, and a wide smile in her many photos at the time, I would have thought she was twelve.

  Sheriff’s deputies were supposed to card at the door of Courtroom 500, barring admittance to anyone under eighteen because the child pornography video would be shown as evidence. Jerhonda had a cheap and obviously fake ID that somehow passed muster. Cutting as many of her sophomore high-school classes as she attended, she took the Metra train to Chicago because she wanted to see Kelly and learn the truth about the things people were saying. “Did he really do it? I wanted to see everything for myself. At the time I was still, you know, pretty starstruck, so I was in disbelief. I thought, ‘Well, maybe that’s not the girl.’” Like everyone who followed the trial closely, she had an opinion about the verdict. “If she would have come forward, I think it would have made a huge difference.”

  Jerhonda met Kelly when he walked into the courthouse. “He seemed like a cool guy, and he would always speak to me when he saw me.” One day, she even got Kelly’s autograph. “He didn’t have anything to sign, and neither did I, but my friend reached into her pocket and found an old bank slip, so I got his autograph on her bank slip.” She showed me. She’d had it laminated.

  In May 2009, eleven months after the trial ended, Jerhonda said a member of Kelly’s crew sought out and friended her on Myspace. He invited her to a party at Kelly’s home at One Maros Lane in Olympia Fields. The singer lived alone, now that his divorce from Andrea was final. The mansion boasted a soaring three-story atrium, five bedrooms, seven baths, half a dozen fireplaces, a home theater, a log-cabin room with a hot tub, and a large, Hawaiian-themed indoor pool. It sat on almost four acres of rolling green hills behind rock walls and iron gates, with a long, t
ree-lined driveway, a pond, a tennis/basketball court, and a six-car garage, all overlooking the fourteenth hole of the Olympia Fields Country Club’s South Course. Jerhonda had never seen anything like it.

  “I was a bit nervous. Even though I had already met him at his trial, I was, like, literally at his house, so it did not feel real.” She had just turned sixteen, and she lied to her parents, telling them she’d be at a friend’s place. During the party, Kelly called her over to the tiki bar in the pool room, saying he remembered her from court. He asked for her cell phone and entered his number. “At the time, I was still, you know, pretty starstruck, so I was in disbelief.” She didn’t tell him her age, and he didn’t ask.

  On June 5, Kelly invited Jerhonda to come back, and he sent one of his crew to pick her up in a black SUV. He told her to bring her bathing suit. “I really thought I was going to his house just to go swimming.” This time, they were alone in the pool room. “He told me that he wanted me to undress for him, and walk back and forth like I was modeling. From the pool room, he took me into his game room, and he just laid me on the couch, and then we had oral sex back and forth. Then he took me into his sex room, which is a room full of mirrors. The entire room is, like, mirrors. We just talked for about thirty minutes, and that very first time, it was just oral sex between us.”

  Kelly also made Jerhonda write and sign letters stating she’d stolen jewelry and cash from him, and that her parents had set her up to blackmail him. He told her it was “insurance” so she wouldn’t talk about their relationship. None of the charges were true, she said, but she did as he instructed.