The First Collection of Criticism by a Living Female Rock Critic (4 page)

The first bus was full of muddy people screaming each others’ names for no reason.

The second bus I got on, a girl was rolling on her boyfriend, nuzzling, muting him with her whole body, her words were past slurring, just some grunting whine; turns out she just wanted a kiss.

CONVERSATION WITH
JIM DEROGATIS REGARDING R. KELLY

The Village Voice
, December 2013

It has been nearly 15 years since music journalist Jim DeRogatis caught the story that has since defined his career, one that he wishes didn’t exist: R. Kelly’s sexual predation on teenage girls. DeRogatis, at that time the pop-music critic at the
Chicago Sun-Times
, was anonymously delivered the first of two videos he would receive depicting the pop star engaging in sexual acts with underage girls. Now the host of the syndicated public radio show
Sound Opinions
and a professor at Columbia College, DeRogatis, along with his former
Sun-Times
colleague Abdon Pallasch, didn’t just break the story, they did the only significant reporting on the accusations against Kelly, interviewing hundreds of people over the years, including dozens of young women whose lives DeRogatis says were ruined by the singer.

This past summer, leading up to Kelly’s headlining performance at the Pitchfork Music Festival, DeRogatis posted a series of discussions about Kelly’s career, the charges made against him, and sexual assault. He published a live review of the singer’s festival set that was an indictment of Pitchfork and its audience for essentially endorsing a man he calls “a monster.” In the two weeks since Kelly released his latest studio album,
Black Panties
, the conversation about him and why he has gotten a pass from music publications (not to mention feminist sites such as Jezebel) has been rekindled, in part because of the explicit nature of the album and also because of online arguments around the Pitchfork performance.

I was one of those people who challenged DeRogatis and was even flip about his judgment—something I quickly came to regret. DeRogatis and I have tangled—even feuded on air—over the years; yet, amid the Twitter barbs, he approached me offline and told me about how one of Kelly’s victims called him in the middle of the night after his Pitchfork review came out, to thank him for caring when no one else did. He told me of mothers crying on his shoulder, seeing the scars of a suicide attempt on a girl’s wrists, the fear in their eyes. He detailed an aftermath that the public has never had to bear witness to.

DeRogatis offered to give me access to every file and transcript he has collected in reporting this story—as he has to other reporters and journalists, none of whom has ever looked into the matter, thus relegating it to one man’s personal crusade.

I thought that last fact merited a public conversation about why.

In this interview (which has been condensed significantly), DeRogatis speaks frankly and explicitly about the many disturbing charges against Kelly and says, ultimately, “The saddest fact I’ve learned is nobody matters less to our society than young black women. Nobody.”

Refresh our memories. How did this start for you?

Being a beat reporter, music critic at a Chicago daily, the
Sun-Times
, R. Kelly was a huge story for me, this guy who rose from not graduating from Kenwood Academy, singing at backyard barbecues and on the L, to suddenly selling millions of records. I interviewed him a number of times. Then
TP2.com
came out. I’d written a review that said the jarring thing about Kelly is that one moment he wants to be riding you and then next minute he’s on his knees, crying and praying to his dead mother in heaven for forgiveness for his unnamed sins. It’s a little weird at times. It’s just an observation.

The next day at the
Sun-Times
, we got this anonymous fax—we didn’t know where it came from. It said: R. Kelly’s been under investigation for two years by the sex-crimes unit of the Chicago police. And I threw it on the corner of my desk. I thought, “playerhater.” Now, from the beginning, there were rumors that Kelly likes them young. And there’d been this Aaliyah thing—
Vibe
printed, without much commentary and no reporting, the marriage certificate. Kelly or someone had falsified her age as 18. There was that. So all this is floating in the air. This fax arrives and I think, “Oh, this is somebody playing with this.” But there was something that nagged at me as a reporter. There were specific names, specific dates, and those great, long, Polish cop names. And you’re not going to make that crap up. So I went to the city desk and I asked, “What do we do with this?” They said, Abdon Pallasch is the courts reporter, why don’t you two look into it and see if there’s anything there? And it turns out there had been lawsuits that had been filed that had never been reported.

When you cover the courts in Chicago or any city, you go twice a day and you go through the bin of cases that have been filed and every once in a while Michael Jordan’s been sued or someone went bankrupt and it’s this sexy story and you pull it out. These suits had been filed at 4 p.m. on Christmas Eve. Ain’t no reporter working at 4 p.m. on Christmas Eve, and they flew under the radar. So we had these lawsuits that were explosive and we didn’t understand why nobody had reported them.

Explosive in what regard?

They were stomach-churning. The one young woman, who had been 14 or 15 when R. Kelly began a relationship with her, detailed in great length, in her affidavits, a sexual relationship that began at Kenwood Academy: He would go back in the early years of his success and go to Lena McLin’s gospel choir class. She’s a legend in Chicago, gospel royalty. He would go to her sophomore class and hook up with girls afterward and have sex with them. Sometimes buy them a pair of sneakers. Sometimes just letting them hang out in his presence in the recording studio. She detailed the sexual relationship that she was scarred by. It lasted about one and a half to two years, and then he dumped her and she slit her wrists, tried to kill herself. Other girls were involved. She recruited other girls. He picked up other girls and made them all have sex together. A level of specificity that was pretty disgusting.

Her lawsuit was hundreds of pages long, and Kelly countersued. The countersuit was, like, 10 pages long: “None of this is true!” We began our reporting. We knocked on a lot of doors. The lawsuits, the two that we had found initially, had been settled. Kelly had paid the women and their families money and the settlements were sealed by the court. But of course, the initial lawsuits remain part of the public record.

So her affidavit, this testimony—it’s all public record?

To this day, any reporter who so cares can go to Cook County and pull these records, so it drives me crazy, even with some of the eloquent reconsiderations we’ve seen of Kelly in recent days, that they keep saying “rumors” and “allegations.” Well, “allegations” is fair, OK. You’re protected as a reporter, any lawsuit that has been filed as fact. The contents of the lawsuit are protected. So these were not rumors. These were allegations made in court.

Do you think part of how it’s been handled and why it’s been underreported is that music writers may not know how to deal with it in a journalistic sense?

Let’s start with the most mundane part. A lot of people who are critics are fans and don’t come with any academic background, with any journalistic background, research background. Now, nobody knows everything, and far be it from me to say you’ve got to be a journalist or you have to have studied critical theory in the academy. Part of what we do is journalistic. Get the names right, get the dates right, get the facts right. Sometimes, on a very rare number of stories, there’s a deeper level of reporting required.

There’s another reason: People are squeamish. I think a lot of people don’t know how to do it, don’t care to do it, and it’s way too much work. It’s just kind of disgusting to have to write about this and bum everyone out when you just want to review a record.

You and I got into it over Twitter around Pitchfork, in part over the fact that you were saying, “If you are enjoying R. Kelly, you’re effectively co-signing what this man has done.” At the time, I was being defensive, saying people can like what they like.

To be clear, I think, Pitchfork was co-signing it. I think each and every one of us, as individual listeners and consumers of culture, has to come up with our own answer. I don’t think there’s a right or wrong answer. The thing that’s interesting to me is that Pitchfork is a journalistic and critical organ. They do journalism and they do criticism. And then when they are making money to present an act—that’s a co-sign, that’s an endorsement. That’s not just writing about and covering it. They very much wanted R. Kelly as their cornerstone artist for the festival. I think it’s fair game to say: “Why, Pitchfork?”

I had purposely not listened to his music since the initial charges came out, and I saw these ninth- and tenth-grade girls interviewed on TV, talking about how he was in the parking lot of their school every day and everyone knew how come. That is what it took for me.

Part of our reporting was sitting with those girls, sitting with their families, seeing their scars on their wrists, hearing the emotion.

Some of our young critical peers, they’re 24 and all they know of Kelly’s past is a vague idea of scandal; they were introduced to him as kids via
Space Jam
. A lot of your reporting on this is not online, it is not Googleable. Collective memory is that he “just” peed in a girl’s mouth.

To be fair, I teach 20-year-olds at Columbia. Ignorance is nothing to be ashamed of. Nobody knows everything. A lot of art, great art, is made by despicable people. James Brown beat his wife. People are always, “Why aren’t you upset about Led Zeppelin?” I got the Bonham three rings [tattooed] on my foot. Led Zeppelin did disgusting things. I read
Hammer of the Gods
, I’m disgusted by the group sex with the shark. [Note: it was actually a red snapper! Still gross.] I have a couple of responses to that: I didn’t cover Led Zeppelin. If I was on the plane, like Cameron Crowe was, I would have written about those things if I saw them.

The art very rarely talks about these things. There are not pro-rape Led Zeppelin songs. There are not pro-wife-beating James Brown songs. I think in the history of rock ‘n’ roll, rock music, or pop culture people misbehaving and behaving badly sexually with young women, rare is the amount of evidence compiled against anyone apart from R. Kelly. Dozens of girls—not one, not two, dozens—with harrowing lawsuits. The videotapes—and not just one videotape, numerous videotapes. And not Tommy Lee/Pam Anderson, Kardashian fun video. You watch the video for which he was indicted and there is the disembodied look of the rape victim. He orders her to call him Daddy. He urinates in her mouth and instructs her at great length on how to position herself to receive his “gift.” It’s a rape that you’re watching. So we’re not talking about rock star misbehavior, which men or women can do. We’re talking about predatory behavior. Their lives were ruined. Read the lawsuits!

And there was a young woman who was pressured into an abortion?

That he paid for. There was a young woman that he picked up on the evening of her prom. The relationship lasted a year and a half or two years. Impregnated her, paid for her abortion, had his goons drive her. None of which she wanted. She sued him. The saddest fact I’ve learned is: Nobody matters less to our society than young black women. Nobody. They have any complaint about the way they are treated: They are “bitches, hoes, and gold-diggers,” plain and simple. Kelly never misbehaved with a single white girl who sued him or that we know of. Mark Anthony Neal, the African-American scholar, makes this point: one white girl in Winnetka and the story would have been different.

No, it was young black girls and all of them settled. They settled because they felt they could get no justice whatsoever. They didn’t have a chance.

And they learned that after putting these suits forth and having them get nowhere? Do you think they didn’t get traction because of the representation they had, or Kelly’s power? Were certain elements in concert with that?

I think it was a lot of things, including the fact that Kelly was fully capable of intimidating people. These girls feared for their lives. They feared for the safety of their families. And these people talked to me not because I’m super reporter—we rang a lot of doorbells on the South and West sides, and people were eager to talk about this guy, because they wanted him to stop!

Going back a little bit to our original question: You get this tape dropped in the mail…

Well, the tape came a year after we ran the first story. We ran this story and the world shrugged. Associated Press picks it up: “
Chicago Sun-Times
has reported a pattern of sexual predation of young women by Robert Kelly,” and everybody says, “Ah, well, OK.” Then one day I get this call that says: “Go to your mailbox. There’s this manila envelope with a videotape in it.”

We had gotten one videotape already after the first story, and we gave it to the police. When I say “we,” I mean a roomful of editors sitting around asking, “What is the right thing to do here? This would seem to be evidence of a felony, we should give it to police.” There was one tape, but the police could not determine the girl’s age. The forensic experts they had looking at it said judging by the soles of her feet, they could tell she was 13 or 14 at the time this tape was made, but we can’t identify who the woman is. Videotape No. 1.