R&B megastar R. Kelly has been found guilty of kidnapping and sexual abuse and faces decades in prison. During the six-week trial, several of Kelly’s victims gave harrowing testimony about the singer’s abuse, which many began when they were teenagers.
The guilty verdict is the best possible outcome in this dire situation. But I can’t help but think about the other adults who have let these black girls and young women down all along. Also, I can’t get the question out of my head why it took the legal system so long to do this.
Serious allegations of abuse and inappropriate contact with minors against the Grammy Award winner, whose real name is Robert Sylvester Kelly, have been in the room for two decades. Why did no one do anything? The answer is simple and consists of two points: first, Kelly was a superstar; second, society simply does not value the lives of black girls and young women.
Why did so many look away?
If you look closely at the singer’s story, you will find a network of helpers who enabled him to continue his behavior with impunity and to ensure the silence of the victims. All of these people helped bring girls and young women at the mercy of a man who was a violent sexual predator and who was known to have “a problem” with young girls as early as 2000 – 21 years ago.
A former tour manager admitted bribery enabled Kelly to marry the late R&B singer Aaliyah when she was only 15 and he was 27. Kelly also had assistants who “organized flights, meals and toilet breaks for his accompanying entourage of young women”. So there were numerous adults who looked the other way or consciously supported Kelly’s behavior – all because society considers black girls to be worthless.
And then there’s the public, who for years refused to admit that the man they admired and who provided the soundtrack to some of our dearest memories is actually a monster. For decades, Kelly barely hid his sexual offenses from the public. He described himself as the “Pied Piper of R&B” – a creepily obvious reference to the legend of the Pied Piper of Hameln, who lured children from the city behind him with the help of his flute. He wrapped his cravings in hypersexualized song lyrics and performances. Among other things, he gave the title to an album Age Ain’t Nothing But A Number, German: “Age is just a number”.
The documentation Surviving R. Kelly (2019) dropped a bomb. Among other things, former residents of Chicago remembered seeing Kelly ambush young girls at a local high school. With all that said, he was able to make millions of dollars, produce hits that topped the charts, and become one of the most iconic and revered figures in R&B history.
No victory of the system
There was also little support from the judicial system. In 2008, Kelly was acquitted of allegations of possession of child pornography images despite what appeared to be overwhelming video evidence. It was not until 2017 that the music journalist of Chicago Sun-Times, Jim DeRogatis, who published the first big story about Kelly in 2000, the police took a renewed interest in the singer. This article and the stirring 2019 documentary brought Kelly’s actions back into the spotlight.
Fast-forward to the 2021 trial, it’s easy to see how the mechanisms that silenced Kelly’s victims for so long continued to play out, even in the face of irrefutable evidence. Kelly’s lawyer Deveraux Cannick called the victims liars and described one of the women as a “mega-prostitute” and “extreme stalker” Kellys. Unfortunately, this form of victim blame is typical when it comes to black female survivors of sexual abuse. One in four black girls in the US is sexually abused before they are 18 years old; and for every black woman who reports rape, at least fifteen black women don’t. These numbers are the product of a system that has long told black women that they either deserve the violence inflicted on them or have not done enough to prevent it.
Without a doubt, Kelly’s conviction is of great benefit to his victims, who have suffered in silence for far too long. But for me this moment is not a victory for the system; on the contrary, it is to be understood as an indictment against a system that took so long to come to this result.
Black women deserved and still deserve better. They have a right to a society that they consider worthy of protection.
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