Soulless

by Jim Derogatis

  On her third visit four days later, Kelly gave Jerhonda a strong but fruity drink he called Sex in the Kitchen, “like his song,” and it hit her hard. “I was drunk, because I wasn’t used to alcohol.” They had intercourse, and Kelly took her virginity. “He thought that was exciting.” They continued having sexual contact for the next seven months, and Kelly filmed many of their encounters. He never asked permission. He just did it.

  “I had to call him ‘Daddy,’ and he would call me ‘baby.’ He wanted me to have two pigtails, and I had to go out and find little schoolgirl outfits,” Jerhonda said. She began spending a lot of time at the mansion. “I noticed every time I brought up me going home, he would ask me, ‘Well, what do you have to do?’ And I was like, ‘I just want to go home to get a change of clothes.’ And he’d go, ‘I could buy you some of those.’ He never wanted me to leave.”

  If Kelly had previously been unaware of Jerhonda’s age, she said she told him for certain that she was sixteen on July 17. “I gave him my state ID,” the real one. She recalled Kelly saying it was fine, but she should tell anyone who asked she was nineteen, and act like she was twenty-five. “I asked him, like, ‘Do you like your girls younger?’ He said, ‘Of course I do, because I can train them.’ He said, ‘Older women, they have too much knowledge. When they’re young, I can train them and I can mold them to be who I want them to be.’”

  When she spent weekends at the mansion, Jerhonda often lied to her parents and said she was staying with her seventeen-year-old friend Dominique Gardner, another thin and petite Kelly superfan one year her senior. They met on Myspace, too, and bonded in person when they both bought tickets for their favorite singer’s concert at the United Center during the Double Up tour in December 2007. Jerhonda had problems at home, with sexual abuse in her past, and she liked staying with Dominique and her mother.

  Jerhonda shared Kelly’s phone number with Dominique, who began calling and texting the star. Dominique first met Kelly after watching him play basketball, then she started going to the mansion, too. While they were there, Jerhonda said they had to follow what Kelly called his “rules,” dressing in baggy clothing, sometimes turning over their phones, and asking him permission to shower, eat, go to the bathroom, or leave the property. “I asked him, ‘Okay, why are you taking my phone away?’” Jerhonda recalled. She hated giving it to him, and often hid it in her pocket. “He said, ‘Because if people knew that we were dating, they would be jealous.’ He said, ‘Everybody would be jealous, and they would try to, you know, take you away from me. They wouldn’t want me around you. They would want what you have, and I don’t want them, I only want you.’”

  If Jerhonda broke Kelly’s “rules” or hesitated when he asked her to perform certain sex acts, she said he insulted and slapped her. “He had strap-ons. We’d have to do stuff like that. And he wanted me to engage in sexual activity with other people while he sat there and he watched. And it wasn’t a comfortable situation.” Nevertheless, she went along. “At the time, I didn’t know what I liked, honestly. I just knew that I liked his music, so I was pretty much accepting of anything that came with him at the time.”

  On occasion, Jerhonda and Dominique were both at the mansion at the same time, but they knew it only if they’d broken Kelly’s rules, kept their phones, and texted each other from the separate rooms where he sequestered them. “He had different girls in different rooms, and he would go room to room doing whatever he did with each girl,” Jerhonda said. On June 14, 2009, two Olympia Fields police cars pulled up to the mansion in search of Dominique. Her family had called for a well-being check, concerned that the seventeen-year-old girl was with Kelly. Dominique wasn’t there—she later told me she was at a cousin’s house—but Jerhonda was watching Transformers in the mansion’s home theater. Usually, Kelly only joined her to watch Bulls games—he once hit her because she was rooting for the Cleveland Cavaliers instead of his favorite team, she said—or Toddlers & Tiaras, a show she claims he loved. With the cops at the door, Kelly panicked, rushed into the theater room, and told Jerhonda to hide.

  “‘They’re looking for a seventeen-year-old. You’re not seventeen, because, like I said, you’re nineteen,’” Jerhonda recalls Kelly telling her. She saw the cops at the door on the mansion’s closed-circuit video system, and she heard Kelly call his attorney Ed Genson, who advised him he didn’t have to let officers search his home if they didn’t have a warrant.

  Word spread on the Net of cops descending on Kelly’s mansion after a frantic call about him preying on teens. Some even used the word “rape.” By the summer of 2010, the fertile new field of online rumor and innuendo had already blossomed to the point where only an idiot believed a quarter of the stuff on gossip websites and fan groups, or on the still-new but exploding social-media platforms of Facebook and Twitter. (Instagram didn’t launch until that October.)

  In July, Lauren FitzPatrick of the Southtown Star got wind of the rumors online, started digging, and discovered that police had indeed visited the mansion. She couldn’t find a police report (it only surfaced a decade later, thanks to a Freedom of Information Act request), and Chief Jeff Chudwin didn’t tell her much. Police “were informed of a possible criminal matter. We investigated the issues, found there to be no crime, and the matters have been closed.” Kelly’s crisis manager Allan Mayer issued a statement on the PR Newswire in response to the rumors on the Net. “This is completely false. No police ever showed up at Kelly’s house with a search warrant nor was his house ever searched. It is also not true, as the unsubstantiated report claimed, that any such girl ever stayed overnight in Kelly’s house or that she had been there but left shortly before some mythical police search. Kelly’s attorneys have informed the police that they will cooperate fully with any investigation.”

  When I first interviewed him for this book, reconnecting after the many times we spoke during the 2000s, Mayer told me he quit as Kelly’s crisis manager the day after the Touré interview. A week later, I realized his statement about the police call came a year after that. “It’s true that for a year or so beyond the Touré interview I continued at the request of Rob’s lawyers to release some statements for him on minor matters,” he said, “but as far as the major issues were concerned, I was done in September 2008, and I never spoke out on his behalf again.” A spin doctor never stops spinning.

  The Olympia Fields police had visited Kelly’s mansion at least three times before. They conducted the well-being check on his wife, Andrea, as requested by her mother in 2003, and they investigated the complaint by Henry Vaughn, the king of the steppers, in 2006. With the help of a reporter at the Chicago Tribune, I also unearthed a heavily redacted file documenting a third visit.

  The file began with an incident report for a criminal sexual assault on a twenty-three-year-old woman on January 27, 2008—five months before the verdict in Kelly’s trial. Police took the woman’s statement at nearby St. James Hospital, which collected a rape kit. The woman told police she’d been invited to a party at the mansion where about thirty people gathered. A man whose name was redacted sexually assaulted her in the studio, according to the police report, and when she protested, he told her, “You talk too much, got too much mouth, this is what I do around here.” The file ended with the detective noting that on January 31, a lawyer representing the victim informed police she didn’t want to press criminal charges, but would file a civil lawsuit. I didn’t find a subsequent legal claim.

  Michelle Kramer, Dominique Gardner’s mother, blamed the Olympia Fields Police for turning a blind eye toward the happenings at the mansion. Kelly was the largest taxpayer in the village of 4,700, Southtown Star reporter Lauren FitzPatrick noted in a follow-up story about the 2009 police call to Maros Lane. His property taxes equaled a tenth of the police department’s annual budget in 2008. “If they’d done their jobs, none of this would have happened,” Kramer told me. Her daughter was one of Kelly’s lovers for nine years, from 2009 until she finally broke with him in 2018.
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br />   Jerhonda told me she had sexual contact with Kelly more than fifty times when she was still sixteen. “He was a very sexual person.” He asked her to engage in threesomes, and she once had sexual contact with him and a woman he called his “trainer,” because she taught new girls “the rules.” The trainer had been best friends since high school with Reshona Landfair, and Jerhonda saw Reshona herself at a party at the mansion one night. Jerhonda recognized Reshona from the half-dozen times she saw the videotape in court.

  In January 2010, Jerhonda broke off contact with Kelly after the two had an argument when he caught her texting a friend. She was still only sixteen. Because she broke his rules, he demanded that she have a threesome with him and another man to prove her loyalty, she said, and she refused. He’d asked and she’d declined once before, and he slapped her then and lashed out again now, holding her against a wall and choking her, she said. “I didn’t want to have sex with anybody else.”

  After Kelly slapped and choked her, Jerhonda said he ordered her to fellate him, and he spit in and ejaculated on her face. “It went all over my forehead, and it was nasty. I wiped it off and I kept his DNA, and I lied to get out of the house,” saying she had to duck out to a nearby relative’s place for fifteen minutes. She offered to show me the semen-stained blue T-shirt that she used to clean herself, and I declined. (In 2018, she gave it to the Olympia Fields Police Department, and although the statute of limitations had not expired, they did not immediately pursue a case. After DNA testing confirmed the presence of Kelly’s semen, the T-shirt would be cited by the state’s attorney as evidence in the new round of charges against the singer in February 2019.)

  Jerhonda corroborated her story by giving me legal documents, phone logs, texts, emails, bank records, letters, and the results of a polygraph test. She broke a nondisclosure agreement with Kelly when we talked, three months before women did the same when speaking out about Harvey Weinstein in the New York Times and The New Yorker. She provided the NDA, and in seventeen years of reporting on Kelly, it was the first time I’d seen the actual legal tool he’d used to silence his victims.

  Except as may be required under compulsion of the law, the parties agree that they shall keep the terms and the existence of this Agreement and of the 2010 Settlement Agreement, strictly confidential and promise that neither they nor their representatives, agents, or attorneys will disclose, either directly or indirectly, any information concerning this Agreement (or the fact of settlement) to any other person or entity. . . . In the event that [Jerhonda] Johnson, her agents, attorneys, or any person or entity acting on their behalf, breaches the confidentiality or non-disparagement provisions of this Agreement, Kelly’s obligations hereunder to make any further payments from and after the breach shall cease. . . . The parties and their attorneys expressly stipulate and agree that confidentiality is imperative and is an essential term of this Agreement. . . . Any breach of this confidentiality provision would cause Kelly irreparable injury. . . . Kelly would be entitled to an injunction, in addition to any other legal remedies he may have.

  A twenty-four-year-old mother of three when we first spoke on the record, Jerhonda was living in Virginia, happily married to her friend Dominique Gardner’s cousin Joseph Pace. She broke down in tears a few times over the phone, but she’d taken more than five years to decide she wanted to tell her story. She mostly powered through with steely determination, only pausing at a few points to talk to one of her children. “You go play now, Mommy’s busy.” We returned to some of the incidents she described half a dozen times in subsequent interviews. Some things were hard to talk about the first time, and I had to do the job of the reporter, pressing for specifics, details, and dates. Almost as difficult as talking about the abuse was charting the long, twisted path of not one but two settlements with Kelly. Jerhonda felt she’d been victimized twice, once by him, and again by lawyers she trusted to help her.

  Shortly after leaving Kelly’s mansion for the last time in January 2010, Jerhonda called the office of Susan Loggans. “It was on their website that they had worked with a lot of women who went against Kelly, and I thought, ‘Oh, that’s a good thing.’ I thought it would be okay, because they had experience with him, and they turned out to be a bunch of floozies.” She was told the settlement would make her a millionaire, she said, and was dissuaded from going to the police. “They said if I was to get criminal charges, it would probably be like it was last time, where he wouldn’t get convicted and it would just be I would be another girl that he did it to. If I wanted real justice, I would go ahead and I would do what I had to do and I would get money from him instead.”

  After the first three lawsuits Loggans filed against Kelly for Tiffany Hawkins, Tracy Sampson, and Patrice Jones, she followed a new tactic, she and several of her clients confirmed. When girls came to the office with complaints about Kelly, Loggans approached his attorneys with their charges directly; provided corroborating evidence—including submitting the girls to lie-detector tests—then struck settlements for payments in return for nondisclosure agreements, all without court records or publicity.

  Loggans sent Jerhonda to take a lie detector test administered by a private detective agency in suburban Hinsdale. F. L. Hunter and Associates sent the seven-page results to the lawyer in a letter dated February 1, 2010. The document details the questions Hunter asked the victim, including whether she had intercourse with Kelly, if she told him she was only sixteen, and whether he slapped, choked, and spit on her during an argument. She answered yes to all the questions. “It is the opinion of this examiner, based upon an analysis of her polygraph records, that she is truthful in her answers,” Hunter concluded.

  As usual, Loggans would not comment, but Jerhonda said and documents confirmed that her attorney struck a $1.5 million settlement for her with Kelly in return for signing an NDA.

  In 2012, Jerhonda complained to Loggans’s office about late or missing payments from Kelly. She provided those emails and the responses, including some from Kelly’s veteran manager Derrell McDavid and his new attorney, Chicagoan Linda Mensch.

  By then, Kelly had serious financial problems. The singer had to pay substantial child support and alimony to Andrea; he owed the IRS nearly $5 million in unpaid taxes, and the mansion he purchased in 2002 had gone into foreclosure. (It had been appraised for as much as $5.2 million before the housing market crashed.) In March 2013, his lender on the property, JPMorgan Chase, bought it for the sole bid of $950,000, and a few months after that, Rudolph Isley, the eldest of the legendary Isley Brothers, wound up with the place at the bargain price of $587,000. Isley, whose brothers’ career Kelly had revitalized in 1995, bought the sprawling estate so he and his wife could live closer to their grandchildren.

  Jerhonda went to a second lawyer, but she fired him because he insisted on working with Loggans, who had all the files for the case. She didn’t want her new lawyer to have anything to do with Loggans, she said, because that firm had never taken her seriously. “Well, I found me another attorney,” she continued. “I was downtown on my way to meet Loggans, because I felt some type of way. I was boiling over with steam, so I was going down there to give Kim”—Loggans’s assistant, Kim Jones—“a piece of my mind. And downtown, outside their building, I ran into a guy. I was eavesdropping, and I heard his conversation, and I saw he was an attorney. And that’s when he got off his phone and I walked up and I said, ‘I have a case for you.’”

  Attorney number three, David Fish, filed suit for Jerhonda not only against Kelly, but against Loggans. That suit claimed the settlement with Kelly was “orchestrated so that they (but not Jerhonda) would be paid their $500,000 immediately. Jerhonda would have to wait for her money [and] ultimately, the man who abused Jerhonda defaulted on his payment obligations.” Jerhonda only got $250,000 of the $1.5 million. (Loggans presumably got all of her $500,000, since Fish’s lawsuit noted that Kelly’s payments totaled $750,000 before he began defaulting.) Jerhonda settled the claim against Loggans for $27,000,
and she settled her second claim against Kelly for $375,000, a fraction of the amount she was initially supposed to get. Things had gotten very complicated.

  After reading about the foreclosure on Kelly’s mansion, Jerhonda felt sorry for the singer she had once considered “a boyfriend.” She began cashing his checks, putting the money in an envelope, and bringing it to Derrel McDavid’s office in Oak Park, she said. She sheepishly told me she also hoped to rekindle her relationship with Kelly. She was still only nineteen at the time. “I was stupid; I was a kid.” She sometimes sounded immature even as a twenty-four-year-old mother of three.

  Although the NDA legally bound her from talking about her relationship with the star, Jerhonda had been hanging out with friends one day when she confided in them. They secretly recorded her on a cell phone and took the video to McDavid’s office, seeking to get paid, Jerhonda said. Kelly’s handlers threatened her for breaking her first NDA for the settlement struck by Loggans. Eventually, they agreed to pay her $375,000 in monthly installments of $5,000, and they got her to sign a second NDA. They believed this deal would finally keep her quiet. Indeed, her then-current attorney, David Fish, strongly advised her not to talk to me, warning that Kelly could retaliate.

  How effective is an NDA? Attorney Damon Dunn pointed me to a ruling by the Appellate Court of Illinois in February 2005 in the case of a woman who sued Michael Jordan after she broke a nondisclosure agreement and talked about her paternity claim against the basketball legend. “We recognize that there are contracts for silence that are unenforceable,” the court wrote. “For example, they may suppress information about harmful products or information about public safety, they may conceal criminal conduct, or they may constitute extortion or blackmail.” Challenging the validity of NDAs to silence victims is now a prime consideration of the #MeToo movement, but the Kelly camp never retaliated against Jerhonda, or even contacted her.