Likewise, the dynamic between a grown male pop star and his teenage core fan base is always tricky. In the 1990s we saw it happen time and time again, where an artist like Kevin Richardson of the Backstreet Boys was twenty-seven during the group’s prime, singing love songs to thirteen-year-olds. It creates this veil of illusion, where both the artist and the fan are ageless through the music. That’s the relationship the music industry creates for album sales and global popularity. It doesn’t matter how disturbing it plays out in real life; this is the business of selling a fantasy. Men with chest hair and possible grays in their goatees are gyrating for girls licking their braces and adjusting their training bras. It’s capitalism in theory, criminal in reality.
Aaliyah was the median age of a typical fan who would lust after an older R&B star, and R. Kelly was in fact a bona fide star when they met. So combine the fandom with the creative partnership and sparks were bound to fly. At least that’s how it was played out in the media. The idea of getting “too close” through the duration of creating an album became the narrative. Their relationship was almost normalized, with the predator sounding more like Aaliyah than Kelly. It was even right down to her debut album, where the title track incriminates her through the music, despite the pen belonging to R. Kelly. Even Kelly’s legal representatives in the past have attempted to allege that R. Kelly didn’t know Aaliyah’s age, despite footage from an old documentary in 1994 surfacing years later where R. Kelly says, “Right now I’m producing a very talented lady, a young lady. She’s fourteen, Aaliyah. She’s real street; she just be chillin’.”
It was an unfair imbalance where the blame fell more upon Aaliyah. After all, she was the one who had to do serious recon following the news breaking. Their partnership ended, and Aaliyah now had to rebuild her career from the ground up, while R. Kelly exited unscathed—until the truth about him got out.
CHAPTER THREE: R. KELLY’S LOST SURVIVOR
That n***a raped my girl.
—Damon Dash, Cannon’s Class, 2019
Dash was the first to call it rape—and it took nearly twenty years for him to say it publicly. While the media tossed around phrases like “forbidden love,” “secret romance,” and “love affair” to describe R. Kelly’s relationship with Aaliyah, none of those descriptors were accurate. It wasn’t until the true sexually abusive patterns of R. Kelly were brought to light that the question of how Aaliyah fit into that narrative came into play, and even then she was still portrayed more like the blushing young bride than the teenage victim.
R. Kelly’s relationship with sex was warped since childhood. In his 2012 autobiography, Soulacoaster: The Diary of Me, Kelly details his first sexual experience. He was eight years old. The woman was “at least ten years older than me,” he reveals. He was molested by that same woman repeatedly for years.
“No matter how many times it happened, I knew I could never tell anyone,” he writes. “I was too afraid and too ashamed.” Psychology experts consistently point to repeated patterns following trauma, where the abused evolves into the abuser if they don’t seek proper mental health treatment. Even in Soulacoaster, while R. Kelly delves shallowly into the damaging effects of that abuse, he places the shame and the blame upon himself, never tackling his need to heal. Instead, he used it as a springboard into his hyper-sexualization that made him millions.
R. Kelly’s book arrived a decade following numerous accusations of pedophilia and statutory rape over the years. The first teenager to come forward was Tiffany Hawkins in 1996. Also known as Tia Hawkins, she was the vocal collaborator on Aaliyah’s Age Ain’t Nothing but a Number album. Hawkins, a Chicago native, met Kelly in Chicago’s Hyde Park neighborhood at the Kenwood Academy, where she sang in the choir. She was fifteen; Kelly was twenty-four. This was 1991, when R. Kelly’s star was just beginning to shine. So when she and her friend spotted him hanging around near her high school, Hawkins—an aspiring singer—had to walk up to Kelly and introduce herself. They formed a rapport rather quickly, which gave Hawkins a false sense of hope that he would help her get her big break. Instead, he made her his teenage madame. Initially, Hawkins served as the wrangler, bringing her young friends over to R. Kelly’s home, where he would have sex with them. Eventually, Hawkins was coerced into the sexual encounters herself. That’s when her sexual relationship with R. Kelly really took form. She eventually moved in with him and stayed for three years, advised by Kelly to cut off contact with all of the people around her. When she learned she was pregnant, Hawkins alleged that she was urged to “handle” the pregnancy and never again mention the possibility that the child was Kelly’s.
About two years into her relationship with R. Kelly, in 1994, Aaliyah came into the picture. Both Hawkins and Aaliyah became good friends, hanging frequently around one of Hawkins’s classmates and also with a background singer of R. Kelly’s named Jovante Cunningham. Together they called themselves Second Chapter. In that infamous interview on BET’s Video Soul Gold, Kelly says the concept behind the title of Age Ain’t Nothing but a Number came from Second Chapter bantering about boys. “She’s running around the studio one day with her friends talkin’ a lot of smack… ‘tell her age ain’t nothing but a number, girl….’ I’m like, ‘So whatchu tryin’ to say?’ ” He wrote the title track in fifteen minutes and had Aaliyah sing it shortly thereafter. Hawkins became a part of the project, as mentioned, even sitting beside Aaliyah on top of a Jeep in Aaliyah’s “At Your Best (You Are Love)” music video. Essentially, they were friends and collaborators, brought together by what has later become known to be a very typical play in R. Kelly’s luring girls together harem-style. Aaliyah was an unfortunate part of this, long before Kelly’s diabolical ploys came to light.
In author and journalist Jim DeRogatis’s book Soulless: The Case Against R. Kelly, he reveals: “All but one of my sources said she and Kelly began having sexual contact during her first recording sessions.” Hawkins says in Lifetime’s Surviving R. Kelly Part II: The Reckoning, “When I found out Robert married Aaliyah, I didn’t care because if someone else was sleeping with him that was great because I didn’t have to.” Her claims in the docuseries were that she was never particularly attracted to R. Kelly, but since he was holding her potential singing career in his hands, she felt as if she had no choice but to obey his wishes. Other girls in the R. Kelly sex circle have stated that eventually Aaliyah and Hawkins fell out, because Hawkins was rumored to be jealous of Aaliyah—maybe due to her sleeping with R. Kelly or because of the fame she had that Hawkins never achieved.
In 1996, the situation came to a head when Hawkins sued R. Kelly for emotional distress, as Hawkins was riddled with trauma and even suicidal. The suit was for $10 million in damages, but by 1998 she settled for $250,000. “I was the first girl, and nobody believed me,” she said in Surviving R. Kelly, “and after that it continued to happen again and again and again.”
Still, the line was hardly drawn to connect R. Kelly’s history with younger girls to his relationship with Aaliyah, perhaps again because it was so clandestine.
“I thought that they had fallen in love, that it was wildly inappropriate on R. Kelly’s part, but that it was some legitimate mistake that her parents had swooped in to correct,” remembers dream hampton. Hampton, executive producer for Surviving R. Kelly, was a writer for Vibe in the late nineties and early aughts and was assigned a cover story on R. Kelly for Vibe’s November 2000 issue. “I wrote the VIBE story that ended up being used in the trial because we shot the cover of him inside the sauna where the rape tape was,” hampton explains. “I was told by his publicist Regina Daniels that I couldn’t ask about Aaliyah when I interviewed him and I was there to basically do an observational kind of ‘making of an album’ piece which is pretty fluffy.” Daniels later had her own issues with R. Kelly, upon learning that he had a secret affair with her young daughter Maxine. During hampton’s assignment, she was scheduled for two days of observation for the profile, but it ended up being nearly a week. “He kept puttin
g off the actual interview,” she adds. “I remembered asking him about Aaliyah, and he was pissed and he glared at me because I had broken the rule that his publicist laid down. Then when the piece came out he called me and cursed me out. And I was like, ‘Did you think we were friends because I’d been there for five days?’ ”
A month later, Pandora’s box was opened.
On December 21, 2000, DeRogatis, then a writer for the Chicago Sun-Times, printed the article “R. Kelly Accused of Sex with Teenage Girls” with Abdon Pallasch, which came following an initial piece on R. Kelly. Shortly before the Thanksgiving holiday that year, DeRogatis—the Sun-Times’s resident pop critic on and off for nearly a decade—received a mysterious fax addressed to him in response to his album review of R. Kelly’s fourth studio album, TP-2.com, the sequel to 12 Play. On his prior album R., Kelly reached new heights with his squeaky-clean mainstream hit “I Believe I Can Fly,” and DeRogatis challenged his ability to volley back and forth seamlessly between sanitized pop hits and sexually charged anthems on this next project, citing examples of other artists like Marvin Gaye who code-switched far more fluidly.
Then the fax arrived, one page and single-spaced:
Dear Mr. DeRogatis,
I’m sending this to you because I don’t know where else to go. You wrote about R. Kelly a couple of weeks ago and compared him to Marvin Gaye. Well, I guess Marvin Gaye had problems, too, but I don’t think they were like Robert’s. Robert’s problem—and it’s a thing that goes back many many years—is young girls.
The letter cited clear examples—one of which named R. Kelly’s goddaughter Reshona Landfair as a victim—with the anonymous writer noting: “I’m telling you about it hoping that you or someone at your newspaper will write an article and then Robert will have no choice but to get help and stop hurting the people he’s hurting.”
It was signed, “A friend,” and so began DeRogatis’s extensive coverage of R. Kelly’s diabolical history, which eventually found Kelly in prison.
Within a month, DeRogatis’s article was printed, calling out not only R. Kelly’s pathological behavior—complete with nods to court records and interviews—but also the mechanisms with which he encounters his underage prey. “Sources said Kelly continues to seek meetings with underage girls by having an assistant press tiny balled-up notes with his phone number into the palms of their hands backstage at concerts or at video shoots,” the article states. DeRogatis later gave R. Kelly’s troubled history a panoramic view with Soulless: The Case Against R. Kelly in 2019. Two weeks after DeRogatis and Pallasch’s article, an anonymous VHS cassette was delivered to their Sun-Times office. On it was a light-skinned girl with long dark hair, kneeling on a pillow and performing oral sex on R. Kelly, among other disturbing visuals. Neither DeRogatis nor Pallasch could identify the girl or her age. They turned the footage over to the police. By this point, Barry Hankerson was long out of the picture. In February of 2000, Hankerson resigned from managing R. Kelly, after riding with him for eight long years—six of which were a part of the tangled allegory involving his niece. Hankerson resigned via a letter to Kelly’s attorney at the time, Gerald Margolis, where Jive Records founder and head Clive Calder was cc’ed. In DeRogatis’s book, he notes that Hankerson’s lawyer advised that “he was leaving because he believed Kelly needed psychiatric help for a compulsion to pursue underage girls.” Many have villainized Hankerson when it comes to his protection of Aaliyah or lack thereof. Many have surmised that he made this union possible and through it allowed for Aaliyah to be fed to the predatory wolf, only to continue managing the wolf in an effort to double dip and cash out on both Kelly’s and Aaliyah’s successes.
It wasn’t that easy. It never is.
Hankerson rarely speaks about what happened between Aaliyah and R. Kelly, but his retributory presence was and still is felt. It’s very possible that he had no idea of how vile R. Kelly was to Aaliyah and that his niece—mature beyond her years—fell for a man who seemed immature beyond his own. If Dash was the first to learn of R. Kelly’s abuse toward Aaliyah, then Barry would have equally been in the dark. However, Barry Hankerson is no fool. He’s a gangster by design and put two and two together when Tia Hawkins came forward. If it could happen to Tia Hawkins, then it could happen to Aaliyah Haughton.
Things seemed to change after that realization.
Hankerson allegedly contacted Minister Louis Farrakhan. Farrakhan delivered a speech in 2019 where he revealed to his congregation that he met with R. Kelly, amid boos from the crowd. Farrakhan hushes them, before continuing. “He was managed by a friend of mine,” Farrakhan says, asking someone side-stage, “What’s that brother’s name? Barry Hankerson.” He continues, “And Barry told me, ‘I’m gonna get rid of him.’ I said, ‘Barry, be patient. That boy is deeply spiritual. A man can’t write no songs like that and not have God all up in him, but he’s got to be cleansed.’ ” The phrase “get rid of him” would lead most to believe that Barry meant he was going to have R. Kelly murdered. DeRogatis inquired about that speech over text to Barry Hankerson. This was his reply: “The Minister prays for the worst of the worst; that’s why he’s the Minister. However, he has guided me well.” He closed the text with “ASA,” an abbreviation for “Assalamu alaikum” or Peace be with you.
“I’m a Muslim. I do my prayers every day,” Hankerson told Geoff Edgers in his 2018 interview with the Washington Post, after being asked if he had any regrets about R. Kelly. Hankerson revealed he was prohibited by law from speaking about his former artist. “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.” While Hankerson clearly didn’t follow through with those plans at the behest of Farrakhan (and Farrakhan warned R. Kelly about the pending threat), he was rumored to have found redemption in other ways.
Information slowly began trickling in about R. Kelly’s despicable patterns. Reshona Landfair’s aunt was R&B singer and R. Kelly protégé Stephanie Edwards, better known as Sparkle. When DeRogatis previously attempted to speak with her, based on the mystery fax’s allegations, she didn’t provide much information. She later called DeRogatis and explained to him that she was shown a VHS tape as well, but this one seemed far different and more revealing than the one sent to the Sun-Times. It wasn’t enough information to implicate R. Kelly without DeRogatis receiving the tape himself.
In February 2002, Jim DeRogatis received a phone call. “Go to your mailbox,” the mysteriously deep voice bassed on the other end. In his mailbox was now a second unlabeled VHS cassette in a manila envelope. On the video was what was later discovered to be three-year-old video footage showing R. Kelly having sex for nearly thirty minutes with a girl who could now be identified as his goddaughter. The video closes with him urinating on her.
Chicago police began an investigation of child pornography, following the police’s anonymous receipt. The footage was then leaked, packaged, and sold by street vendors as a “sex tape,” in response to which R. Kelly denied the claims that it was him on the tape. He later said he had a twin brother, placing the blame on his non-twin brother Carey Kelly and offering him $50,000, a recording contract, and a new car to take the fall.
The accusations piled on, primarily involving underage girls. By August 2001, an Epic Records intern in Chicago, Tracy Sampson, sued R. Kelly for forcing her into oral sex with another woman at seventeen, though years later she told Dateline that their sexually abusive relationship started around 1999 when she was just sixteen. They ended their relationship when Sampson turned eighteen, and while the suit was for $50,000, she received a $250,000 settlement in 2002. In addition to the leaked video, that year proved to be monumental in R. Kelly’s twisted history of sexual allegations.
It’s unclear whether Barry Hankerson orchestrated the leaking of the tape, or was it simply Sparkle who hand delivered the video to DeRogatis’s mailbox? DeRogatis to this day doesn’t know who brought him that tape, but he has his suspicions. If
Barry was the man behind R. Kelly’s downfall, it would make perfect sense; he hurt Barry’s niece. The abuse didn’t start or end there, though.
In April of 2002, Patrice Jones filed a $50,000 lawsuit against R. Kelly, alleging he had sex with her when she was sixteen, impregnated her, and then forced her to have an abortion. Jones settled her case as well. In May of that same year, Isley Brothers backup dancer Montina “Tina” Woods sued R. Kelly for filming them having sex without her consent, the product distributed as a sex tape titled R. Kelly: Triple-X. By June, he was indicted on twenty-one counts of child pornography. While he posted his own $750,000 bail, he also pleaded not guilty in court. A six-year span stretched between the accusations and the trial, despite R. Kelly racking up twelve more counts of child pornography between 2002 and 2004. Footage was seized from a Florida home that Kelly was renting, including cameras showing film of minors engaging in sexual activity; R. Kelly is in some of the photos. However, because the footage was illegally obtained, it couldn’t be used during his trial. That trial wouldn’t happen until May of 2008, and a month later he was acquitted on all counts of child pornography. The reason for the acquittal stemmed from one woman: Reshona Landfair. She denied claims that it was her in the tape, refused to appear in court to testify, and dismissed any allegations that she had a sexual relationship with her godfather. This ultimately forced the court’s hand, and so R. Kelly was acquitted.
Eleven years later, in 2019, his goddaughter came forward once Kelly’s abusive patterns finally came into focus after two and a half decades of failing to adequately charge him. An article in the Chicago Tribune reported that his goddaughter’s long-awaited cooperation was an act of “bravery,” where she more than likely lied previously for her own self-protection. “It will be harder for Kelly to wriggle out of this one,” Chicago Tribune reporter Dahleen Glanton writes. “The 52-year-old R&B singer is battling charges of sexual assault, obstruction of justice, child pornography and racketeering. Prosecutors said Kelly sexually assaulted 12 women, at least eight of whom were underage at the time and some as young as seventh and eighth graders.” New video also surfaced seventeen years after the first tape, showing R. Kelly urinating in the face of a minor and choking her, saying out loud on the tape that she is only fourteen and having her reiterate her age. Another victim, Joycelyn Savage, came forward later in 2019 and told stories of R. Kelly urinating and defecating in her mouth. This is all on top of further investigations starting in 2017 that R. Kelly was running an underage sex cult.
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