Soulless

by Jim Derogatis

  Was any of that true? I wasn’t eager to find out, but nobody ever got murked, as far as I know. I asked Hankerson in early 2019 about Farrakhan’s comments, and he gave me a rare response via text. “The Minister prays for the worst of the worst; that’s why he’s the Minister. However, he has guided me well. ASA.” That’s “ASA” as in “as-salāmu ʿalaykum.” Peace be upon you.

  The number of times Hankerson has spoken publicly since he split from Kelly in 2000 can be counted on one hand. He and his son Jomo continue to oversee the recorded legacy of Aaliyah, whose large following remains intensely loyal, though her status is nowhere near that of many departed musical greats. “[You] won’t find most of her music online,” Stephen Witt wrote in a long and well-reported article for Complex in late 2016. “Aaliyah’s most popular, most important works—the albums One in a Million and Aaliyah, and late-career singles like ‘Are You That Somebody?’—aren’t available for streaming or sale on Spotify, iTunes, Amazon, or any other online music service.” Ironically, the only record that is available is the one produced by Kelly, Age Ain’t Nothing but a Number, the one the Hankersons don’t control. “Only her uncle, mysterious music industry exec Barry Hankerson, knows why.”

  Hankerson did not talk to Witt, but in mid-2018, he did speak briefly to Geoff Edgers of the Washington Post. “Hankerson said he was ‘legally’ prohibited from discussing Kelly,” Edgers wrote. “When asked if he had regrets, Hankerson grew emotional. ‘Let me tell you something. I’m a Muslim,’ he said. ‘I do my prayers every day, and I lost my niece in a plane crash, and please excuse my language, but I don’t really give a fuck about none of them people you’re talking about.’”

  None of Aaliyah’s other family members ever talk about her to the media, and most remained silent even after Surviving R. Kelly prompted renewed interest in their daughter’s relationship with the singer. Her mother, Diane Haughton, did curtly deny that Aaliyah ever had sex with Kelly. But the most illuminating comment by anyone close to Kelly’s most successful protégé came from Damon Dash, her boyfriend at the time of the plane crash. Broken up about her death and angry at his friend Jay-Z, Dash left the label he cofounded, Roc-A-Fella Records, soon after Aaliyah’s accident. He stopped talking to Jay-Z because he thought the rapper should have publicly condemned Kelly instead of heading out with him on the Best of Both Worlds tour.

  In early 2019, Dash recalled what Aaliyah shared about her relationship with Kelly, in an interview with Hip Hop Motivation. “I remember Aaliyah trying to talk about it, and she couldn’t. She would just leave it at, ‘That dude was a bad man.’ And I didn’t really wanna know what he did, to the extent that I might feel the need to deal with it, just ’cause that’s what a man does. But it was just so much hurt for her to revisit it. It was like, I wouldn’t even want to revisit it without a professional. Whatever got done was terrible.”

  During the trial and in the press, Kelly, his lawyers, and his handlers said they believed Hankerson and Sparkle were behind the video making its way to me, the Sun-Times, and thus the police. I understood why many in the black community, troubled by someone’s actions and wanting to stop him, might turn to a journalist before an officer of the law. “Growing up in the ’hood, the number-one rule was don’t snitch,” Kelly himself says in Soulacoaster. While I still don’t know if the Hankerson/Sparkle theory about the 2002 case is true, I did learn more about that videotape, and that was thanks to Twitter, too.

  After my friend and public-radio colleague Peter Sagal tweeted a flattering compliment about my work, a Chicago attorney named Ian Alexander DM’ed me. He and Peter’s brother Roger went to law school together, they’re close friends, and their kids attend Hebrew school together in the suburbs.

  When Demetrius Smith was on the outs with Kelly in the fall of 1996, around the time he heard his old friend speak in the voice of the demon, Smith felt sorry for one of the high school girls Kelly had sexual contact with, Tiffany Hawkins. Smith brought Tiffany to the law firm of Susan E. Loggans & Associates. It advertised a lot, Loggans did a lot of radio and television interviews, and she seemed to get results.

  After passing the bar, Ian Alexander took his first job as a lawyer at Loggans’s firm. He was twenty-five, and he loved music. (He told me he always read my reviews and listened to Sound Opinions.) When Smith brought Tiffany to the office, Loggans didn’t want the case. “Who’s R. Kelly? It’s not like he’s Frank Sinatra,” she said. Alexander insisted the singer was a big deal. Loggans took the case, and the young music-loving lawyer did all the work on the first legal claim accusing Kelly of having sex with underage girls. Loggans never even met Tiffany, she admitted, and she didn’t think highly of Alexander. “I thought he was a schmuck,” she told me.

  The ill will was mutual. “I was definitely a schmuck by virtue of the fact that I worked for her and let her sell out these poor girls,” Alexander said. “That’s something that I’ll have to live with.”

  Alexander is haunted by yielding to pressure from Loggans to settle the case as soon as Kelly’s lawyers, Gerald Margolis and John M. Touhy, made their first offer of $250,000 in exchange for an NDA the day after Tiffany’s “hair-raising” seven-and-a-half-hour deposition. Abdon Pallasch and I had never thought to call any other attorney working for Loggans, though Alexander’s name appears on many of the 235 pages in Tiffany’s legal file. We kick ourselves for missing that step now, though Alexander says he couldn’t have talked to us anyway, because of attorney-client confidentiality. He was still reluctant to address Tiffany’s case in 2019, but he did say one thing about his former client that shocked me.

  Tiffany initially wanted to press criminal charges. On her behalf, Alexander contacted the office of the Illinois state’s attorney at the time, Jack O’Malley, but they chose not to pursue the case. Tiffany only filed her civil claim after law enforcement declined to act. More than two decades of predatory behavior might have been stopped there, in 1996.

  Ethical concerns didn’t apply to the other surprising story Alexander told me, because he never represented anyone connected with it.

  When I started reporting in late 2000, graphic Kelly videotapes were already floating around “on the streets.” They began showing up for sale as bootlegs in mid-2001. The first tapes and DVDs featured dancer Montina Woods and the girl Abdon and I never identified. The crew Kelly played basketball with at the time included someone my sources alternately described as “a thug,” “a guy from the street,” and “this dude originally from Philly.” In his book and in interviews with me, Smith said the man’s name was Generaall. I failed to learn anything else about him, much less contact him.

  Smith said Generaall stole the tape with Reshona from Kelly’s gym bag one night when the singer left it on the sidelines during a game at Hoops. “It passed from the hands of a thief, through the hands of street chiefs, gang leaders,” Kim Dulaney wrote in Star Struck. When copies of the tape with Reshona began to circulate among Kelly’s hangers-on in late 2001, some were titillated. Others were disgusted. Tapes of Kelly with legal-age women were one thing. The tape of him violating a fourteen-year-old was something else.

  Sparkle told me she first heard about the tape on Friday, December 14, 2001, when two friends told her they’d seen it. On Tuesday, December 18, a man visited her claiming to have been sent by a lawyer named Buddy Meyers. He showed her the tape, which disgusted and infuriated her. She told me and said in her sworn testimony at the trial that she didn’t know the man, and he left with the tape, though he gave her a business card.

  The card was from the firm of Meyers, Alexander & Kosner. That’s Alexander as in Ian Alexander. He had quit Susan E. Loggans & Associates and started his own practice with two new partners, one of them Buddy Meyers.

  On Monday or Tuesday, December 17 or 18, two men visited Alexander at his new firm’s offices. They occupied part of a floor at 640 North LaSalle Drive, a block from the Rock ’N’ Roll McDonald’s. The two men knew Alexander had represented Tiffany Hawkins. He un
derstood how Kelly operated, he did right by Tiffany, and they wanted to talk to him.

  Alexander had met Demetrius Smith, and he knew the names of several members of Kelly’s crew, because he had worked on Tiffany’s lawsuit for nearly two years. He didn’t recognize the men who came to his office, and he said he didn’t know and cannot remember their names. The men had a videotape they wanted to show him. The office didn’t have a VCR, so Alexander and the two men went down the hall to Act One Studios, a now-defunct performing arts school that rented space on the same floor.

  The tape the men showed Alexander included footage of Kelly with two different partners. The first, the men told him, was a girl named Reshona. The second, they said, was gospel singer Deleon Richards, who’d married New York Yankees outfielder Gary Sheffield.

  Alexander wanted nothing to do with the video of Richards and Kelly. “I told the guys who brought it that I would not be a part of what seemed like a scheme to extort/blackmail Kelly regarding a consensual sexual relationship,” Alexander wrote via email, one of many such exchanges and interviews. “I said if they did anything with that, they’d probably go to jail. That’s the last time I ever thought about the second part of the tape.”

  When we first spoke, Alexander didn’t know the rest of the story about the tape of Kelly with Richards, but I suggested he look it up. Derrick Mosley, “the poor man’s Jesse Jackson,” later used a copy of that video in an attempt to grab $20,000 from Sheffield. Convicted of extortion, Mosley spent two years in prison. Alexander found the stories about Mosley, Richards, Sheffield, and extortion online. He also found Mosley’s photos on the Web. Mosley looked familiar. “Here is what I think,” Alexander wrote. “Derrick Mosley and his partner in crime brought that tape to me. I honestly have no idea who the other guy was.” Mosley would not talk to me for this book.

  As it would most people of conscience, the tape of Kelly and Reshona sickened Alexander. He told the two men who visited him that he would be willing to help the teenager if she wanted to file a lawsuit or press criminal charges against Kelly. They wanted Alexander to hold on to the tape, but he refused to keep child pornography in his office. They left with it, but said they would return with Reshona and her family. Alexander scheduled the meeting.

  On Wednesday, December 19, 2001, Sparkle called the state’s attorney’s office and talked to Robert Heilingoetter. She called DCFS, child protective services, and talked to a woman named Kim. Then she called me. She mentioned the name Buddy Meyers—the one on the business card left by the man who visited her—in all three calls. Meyers had been vague when we spoke on December 20. “I have no idea why they threw my name around . . . I’ve heard some scuttlebutt, but that’s all I’m at liberty to say.” Soon after Sparkle made her cold call to the state’s attorney’s office, investigators visited Meyers, Alexander & Kosner. Alexander told them he didn’t have a tape; they’d have to get a warrant if they wanted to search for a tape; no judge would grant a warrant to search a law office, and anyway, he was not representing anyone in connection to a tape—yet.

  Alexander had the meeting on his calendar, and he believed Reshona and one or more of her family members were driving to his office—he thinks he ordered a car service to bring them from Oak Park—when Kelly’s attorney Ed Genson “intercepted” them. Either Genson knew about the tape because the two men told Kelly they had it, or Sparkle called Kelly and gave him holy hell after she saw the tape of him and her niece. (Sparkle would not talk to me again for this book.) I don’t know what Kelly and Genson did next. Kelly certainly hasn’t spoken to me, and Genson, who is retired and ailing, did not respond to my calls, emails, or letters.

  While they were running around with the tape, the two men may also have talked to some of the bootleggers who provided the knockoff VHS tapes, DVDs, and CDs for sale on street corners. The first Kelly sex videos with Montina Woods and the girl Abdon and I never identified had done good business. The new one would grab even more attention.

  I had talked to a vendor at the Maxwell Street Market in 1998 for a story about bootlegging, and I asked where he got his counterfeit goods. He looked at me as if I had two heads. It was as simple as setting up a few machines, and hitting play on one and record on the others. Bigger operators either sold wholesale to vendors or left their wares on consignment. You get a better deal on consignment, he advised—he had heard music critics got a lot of advance CDs—but you had to trust the guy who peddled your product to deliver your cut.

  Genson and Alexander were friendly. Chicago is a very big small town, and the legal scene is even smaller. Genson called to apologize for “hijacking” the meeting Alexander thought he’d scheduled with Reshona and her family. It was just business, no hard feelings. This was about six weeks before the tape arrived in my mailbox. Did that only happen because someone’s original plan got derailed? Had one or more members of the Landfair family intended to sue, press criminal charges, or both?

  Ultimately, Reshona and her parents, Greg and Valerie, remained loyal to Kelly and never spoke to anyone, media or investigators. Alexander never saw the two men with the tape again, and he never spoke to the Landfairs or Sparkle. He followed every word about the case against R. Kelly in the papers through the six-year wait for the trial and once the proceedings started. His name didn’t come up once, and he was glad it didn’t.

  In the early spring of 2002, bootlegged copies of the tape appeared for sale on the streets, not only in Chicago but in other big cities, as officials said at the press conference announcing Kelly’s indictment. It was child porn, they noted, and they advised anyone who had a copy to destroy it.

  While I’ve long wondered about the path of the copy I got, what’s important is that it was out there at all. The videotape was a dirty bomb, a radioactive weapon ready to be used against Kelly by someone out for a big payday, sickened by his treatment of young girls, or set on revenge for the damage he’d caused.

  Hankerson’s niece Aaliyah had been hurt by Kelly. “What really pushed Barry over the edge about really wanting to destroy Rob was that Aaliyah died, and the guilt he felt,” one of Kelly’s handlers told me in early 2019. Reshona was having sex with Kelly, and the teenager’s parents weren’t stopping it. Sparkle is still furious. “I have a vendetta against him because of what he did to my niece,” she told NBC’s Dateline on January 18, 2019. Kelly’s handlers claimed Sparkle and Hankerson were angry because their business dealings with the star had soured. That may be true as well. But can anyone blame them or the hundreds of loved ones of girls Kelly hurt for hating him for any number of reasons?

  Sparkle told me several times during the six weeks between when she first saw the tape and when we watched it together in the Sun-Times video closet that she was frustrated that the state’s attorney’s office and DCFS weren’t acting. Why couldn’t they just go arrest Kelly already? she asked every time we spoke. No one seemed to be doing anything.

  Both Sparkle and Hankerson denied they personally dropped the tape in my mailbox. Did either of them ask someone—“a guy in a bow tie,” a member of the NOI’s Fruit of Islam, perhaps—to drop a copy in my mailbox to speed things up? They never said.

  Given that the tape began to appear for sale on the streets shortly after the Sun-Times revealed its existence, it was only a matter of time before it made its way to the media, law enforcement, or both. The tape was out there, and the story had been out there long before the tape. I just got both first.

  While the tale of the tape is fascinating for what it says about the people around Kelly—opportunistic, disgusted, out for retribution, all of that and more—it doesn’t really matter. What matters is what was on the tape. Here was seemingly irrefutable evidence of Kelly hurting an underage girl, one of many for almost three decades. The defense did refute it, however, and a jury of the singer’s peers acquitted him. And so a pattern of predatory behavior that started in 1991 continued.

  R. Kelly has a lot to answer for, as his old friend Demetrius Smith said, and maybe so
meday he will. I’ve certainly posed many questions, via his lawyers, managers, publicists, “crisis managers,” and record-company overseers, dating back to November 2000.

  After my BuzzFeed News articles in the summer of 2017, Kelly suffered a new round of defections from his latest inner circle, including his musical accompanist, DJ Phantom, and his lawyer, Linda Mensch, who’d given the memorable quote about how Kelly just wanted everyone to “put down the guns and embrace peace and love.” Mensch emailed that Kelly is “a brilliant artist, with unlimited talent. But . . .” I pressed her several times on what exactly she meant by that “but” followed by an ellipsis, but she told me the partners at her law firm advised her not to talk to me. Phantom had no problem speaking his mind about Kelly. “He’s a shitbag,” he told me.

  Three of the six members of Kelly’s “cult” also left; those are women I’ve never named publicly. Dominique stayed for a while longer, and Joy and Azriel are still there as of this writing.

  Kelly’s career began to flounder after the year of indie outreach in 2013, when he split with his longest-serving manager, Derrel McDavid. I tried to talk to him in 2017, too, and he Facebook messaged me. “I’d appreciate it if you’d just let me sit this one out. Thanks. You’ve pretty much destroyed him.” By the spring of 2018, Kelly had a new manager, Henry James Mason, an unknown in the music business who just went by “Mason.” He had a flair for the dramatic and, like so many around Kelly, occasionally talked like a movie gangster.

  In March 2018, I sat in a hall at the Austin Convention Center during the South by Southwest Music Conference & Festival, listening to a keynote address by Lyor Cohen, co-founder of Def Jam Recordings, now Global Head of Music at YouTube and Google. I was glad I’d set the ringer on my iPhone to silent, because it vibrated with five calls in rapid succession. Whoever was trying to reach me clearly wasn’t going to stop, so I stepped out to return the call. It was Mason.