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  When DeRogatis moved over to penning pieces for BuzzFeed, he wrote one in July 2017 breaking down how families were torn apart over their daughters being locked in a sex cult with the self-proclaimed Pied Piper of R&B. “Kelly confiscates the women’s cell phones,” DeRogatis writes in the piece, “so they cannot contact their friends and family; he gives them new phones that they are only allowed to use to contact him or others with his permission.” They’re also forced to call him Daddy, as he calls them his babies, and they’re dressed in baggy jogging suits because he doesn’t want their bodies “exposed.” If other men are in the room, the girls must face a wall so they can’t be looked at or show their eyes to anyone, particularly men. Heartbroken parents detail that they felt their children were brainwashed once in his clutches. However, the ones who have escaped over the years eventually found their voice.

  The boost in confidence from the victims happened once an entire series was dedicated to documenting R. Kelly’s aggressions. Lifetime, the same network that released the Aaliyah: The Princess of R&B biopic—which portrayed Aaliyah’s relationship with R. Kelly as true romance in 2014—then released Surviving R. Kelly in 2019 and Surviving R. Kelly Part II: The Reckoning in 2020, complete with interviews about Kelly’s abusive nature toward young girls. “I was invited into the project,” dream hampton expresses. “I couldn’t say no. He was my generation’s problem to solve. I felt that there was some movement happening with #MuteRKelly and another showrunner wouldn’t honor the activism.”

  During the New York City screening of Surviving R. Kelly, a threat of violence was called in, after which the NeueHouse Madison Square theater had to evacuate.

  * * *

  Prior to Surviving R. Kelly, it felt as though everyone had forgotten about his criminal behavior, especially in the absence of convictions, along with denials on R. Kelly’s behalf. Everyone, that is, except for Damon Dash. Once he and Aaliyah started dating in 2000, he “knew everything.” In Surviving R. Kelly Part II: The Reckoning, Dash refers to Aaliyah as the “sacrificial lamb” of R. Kelly’s twisted world. He explained in the docuseries that Aaliyah referred to R. Kelly as a “bad man,” though she held no malice against him. Per Dash, Aaliyah’s standpoint was, “Let that man live, but just keep him the fuck away from me.”

  However, Dash’s animosity toward R. Kelly eventually trickled into his business. As the co-founder of Roc-A-Fella Records along with Jay-Z, Dash was faced with a dilemma toward the end of 2000 when Jay-Z agreed to appear on the remix to R. Kelly’s TP-2.com single “Fiesta.” By this point, Dash was almost thirty and had already been dating Aaliyah for several months, aware of what R. Kelly had done to her. In a video interview on Nick Cannon’s Cannon’s Class, Dash broke it down: “If me and you are cool and you know that I got a girl that your man raped and I tell you and you gonna still work with him, whatchu gonna feel?” he hypothetically asks Cannon, referring to Jay-Z’s awareness of what R. Kelly had done to Aaliyah and still agreeing to work with him. “That n***a raped my girl, that he liked as well, and went on a tour with him.”

  Dash also told Page Six in 2019 that Jay-Z had a failed attempt to woo Aaliyah before he did. “He tried very hard,” Dash told Page Six. “But you know, we were both going hard…. everybody was trying to get to Aaliyah—it was not just Jay. I did not know Jay was trying to holler at her, but then it just happened like that. He was trying; I was trying. Everybody was trying—he was going hard.” Many have argued that Jay-Z did date Aaliyah before Dash had, while others claim the two were just hanging out. Hampton remembers first introducing Aaliyah and Jay-Z one night at a club in New York City and then learning they kept in touch after that evening. Jay-Z had already been a fan, having sampled Aaliyah’s “One in a Million” for his track “Intro: A Million and One Questions/Rhyme No More” off In My Lifetime, Vol. 1. All of this predates Aaliyah’s relationship with Dash.

  But that acknowledgment of Jay-Z’s feelings for Aaliyah in any capacity left Dash shocked that he would agree to work with someone who violated her. Then again, maybe it was spite? A retaliatory move, where again Aaliyah was the unfortunate pawn. There is no real way to prove the motive behind Jay-Z’s decision to work with R. Kelly, though Dash argues it frayed the already-weakening Roc-A-Fella bond.

  The final straw snapped in 2002, after Aaliyah had died, when Jay-Z joined forces with R. Kelly for the Best of Both Worlds collaborative album. On the title track, Jay-Z even goes as far as mentioning grieving Aaliyah, and then saying, “But I hope my boy Dash gets to see her when he passes.” Dash refused to have his name on the project, and whatever proceeds he received from anything involving Best of Both Worlds he donated to a breast-cancer charity in honor of Aaliyah’s late grandmother. This was also the rumored reason why Roc-A-Fella Records was dismantled a short while later.

  All of this begs the question of what exactly happened to Aaliyah during her time with R. Kelly. Damon Dash called it rape, arguably beyond statutory, though he’s one of very few people who are vocal about anything criminal regarding Aaliyah and R. Kelly. Prior to their public marriage annulment in 1995, on September 29, 1994 (less than a month after the date on their marriage certificate), a document was signed by R. Kelly, Aaliyah, and both of Aaliyah’s parents. The document was anonymously sent to DeRogatis, all of which he reports in Soulless. The agreement states that R. Kelly is to pay $100 to Aaliyah in exchange for cutting ties altogether and never mentioning their relationship again, “due to the nature of the music industry and its ability to engender rumors and disseminate personal information, both true and untrue,” as per the agreement. That $100 was also rumored to actually be $3 million “off the books,” as DeRogatis puts it. Further, R. Kelly was not held accountable for anything that happened, or anything that may happen, even “a decline in her ability, reputation, or marketability… emotional distress caused by any aspect of her business or personal relationship with Robert… [or] physical injury or emotional pain and suffering from any assault or battery perpetrated by Robert against her person.” R. Kelly’s attorney in the matter, Arnold E. Reed, and Barry Hankerson were the mediators who would police and prevent any further interaction. This prevented Aaliyah from vocalizing her experience publicly. Years later, it may have even prevented her from coming forward as a survivor with the rest of the young women. The situation was written off many times as having never happened, despite so many bearing witness to the traumatizing disaster that continued on for far too long.

  During Surviving R. Kelly, Jovante Cunningham tells a startling story, where she and Kelly’s entourage were all sitting on their tour bus when the back-bedroom door flew open to expose Kelly having sex with Aaliyah in plain view. Per Cunningham, R. Kelly was doing “things that an adult should not be doing with a child.” She punctuated that sentiment with expressing “how people are still suffering behind things that went on twenty years ago.” Aaliyah’s mother, Diane Haughton, released a statement calling Cunningham a liar and saying that both she and Aaliyah’s father, Mike, were always on tour with Aaliyah, leaving no room for this behavior to occur. “These lies and fabrications cannot be tolerated and allowed to be spewed from the forked tongues of saboteurs of Aaliyah’s legacy,” Diane Haughton added in the statement.

  Lisa Van Allen—who also appeared in Surviving R. Kelly to detail her abusive relationship with Kelly when she was just seventeen—shed further light on Kelly’s relationship with Aaliyah in an interview with VladTV in 2019. Van Allen said she first developed a trusting relationship with R. Kelly, who through discussing how he was molested by his sister growing up formed a bond with Van Allen. He then went on to discuss Aaliyah. “They had a pact,” she says. “Pins in Eyeballs—no matter what anyone said or if anyone stuck pins in their eyeballs, they would never tell about their relationship.” If what Van Allen is saying is true, then Kelly again created this juvenile circle of trust, like two kids spitting in the palms of their hands and shaking on it. Van Allen also made another harrowing claim. “He did get a litt
le more in depth in details when her mother found out. He actually stayed in their home in Detroit, and her mother actually was sexually attracted to him as well,” she continues. “He said when Aaliyah would go to sleep that he would—now this is what he said—he said that he would go in the living room and him and her would do sexual acts on the couch, while Aaliyah was asleep in the bedroom.” Diane Haughton has vehemently denied those claims. Van Allen then continued to explain that Kelly confided that he did marry Aaliyah with a doctored marriage certificate and that she was pregnant at the time. R. Kelly supposedly felt that if he could say he didn’t know she wasn’t eighteen, then he wouldn’t get in trouble if anyone found out about her pregnancy before Aaliyah was able to have an abortion, because she was now his wife.

  “And this came out of his mouth,” Van Allen adds. “I could take a lie detector test to this. This is what he told me.” An extended version of the pregnancy story is also told in the 2011 book The Man Behind the Man: Looking from the Inside Out, where a man named Demetrius Smith—who was once employed by R. Kelly—states that during his Miami tour stop, Aaliyah frantically called Kelly to tell him that she ran away from home and that she thought she was pregnant. The two flew to Chicago for the fake ID and marriage certificate, and once the marriage was secured, R. Kelly jumped right back on his tour. In court documents, Aaliyah admits that she lied about her age on the marriage certificate. Smith appears in Surviving R. Kelly to acknowledge his own guilt, as he was there for the wedding. “I was in the room when they got married,” Smith said. “I’m not proud of that. I had papers forged for them when Aaliyah was underage. It was just a quick little ceremony; she didn’t have on a white dress; he didn’t have on a tux. Just everyday wear. She looked worried and scared.” Aaliyah ran away from home prior to the wedding and after being left in the hotel room as R. Kelly went back on tour following their marriage she returned home and confessed to her parents and to Barry what had happened.

  In 2016, R. Kelly spoke with GQ magazine in what was described as a candid interview, with no restrictions and no holds barred. Kelly echoes his childhood trauma, as well as highlighting the cyclical nature of sexual abuse. “R. Kelly, a man who has been accused of multiple sexual offenses against underage girls, has just explained that he believes the sexual abuse he suffered is something that is passed down from generation to generation, so that in each new generation, victim becomes perpetrator,” journalist Chris Heath writes. “Once he has said these words, and they are hanging in the air between us, it just seems impossible to imagine that he won’t at least address the obvious question—the question, he must surely realize, that anyone reading this would immediately ask: By that logic, wouldn’t that make you the next in the cycle of child molesters?” Naturally, R. Kelly’s response to his own guilty admission led to a deflection of any further probing, amplifying his denial yet again.

  When the subject of Aaliyah arrives, he acknowledges that they loved each other but still remains vague. “Well, because of Aaliyah’s passing, as I’ve always said, out of respect for her mother who’s sick and her father who’s passed, I will never have that conversation with anyone,” he says. “Out of respect for Aaliyah, and her mother and father who has asked me not to personally. But I can tell you I loved her, I can tell you she loved me, we was very close. We were, you know, best best best best friends.” He then adds that Aaliyah and her family had an opportunity to talk publicly about this when she was still alive, with no mention of their agreement of silence. His obtainment of false identification to marry Aaliyah in 1994 came back around in 2019, when he was indicted on a new count of bribery for bribing an official for a fake ID. Aaliyah is listed as Jane Doe #1 on the indictment. He pleaded guilty at the brief hearing, which he attended over video from jail.

  R. Kelly’s unhinging in the media happened right before our eyes. A year earlier, in 2018, a video resurfaced from an interview with Touré for BET, which birthed the quote heard round the world:

  Touré: Do you like teenage girls?

  R. Kelly: When you say teenage, how old are we talking?

  The Q&A went retroactively viral in the wake of social media, especially upon realization that Kelly was in his forties when he supplied that answer. Then, in 2019, CBS This Morning’s co-host Gayle King interviewed R. Kelly for a prime-time special, where she sat calmly as he rose from his seat and beat his chest in both a televised and choreographed meltdown. This unraveling only set the stage for what was to come. On July 23, 2018, R. Kelly released a nineteen-minute song called “I Admit,” where he goes controversy by controversy, defending his “innocence” in parts, and confessing in others. There’s a part in the song where he details an interaction with Wendy Williams, where Williams is asking him a series of questions. “She said, ‘What about Aaliyah?’ ” R. Kelly sings of Williams’s inquiry, to which he responds to himself, “I said, ‘Love.’ ” He follows the line with Williams asking about his sex tape, referring to the situation as a setup.

  Currently, R. Kelly sits in prison since the summer of 2019, following his arrest for sex trafficking that July. His requests for release have been denied, including one plea in March 2020 from his own concern for his health and safety during the COVID-19 pandemic. That same month, he was charged with nine more counts of sex trafficking, with racketeering, and eight violations of the Mann Act filtered in. The Mann Act, passed in 1910 by President William Howard Taft, prohibited the transporting of women and girls for “immoral purposes,” i.e., prostitution. Also called the White-Slave Traffic Act of 1910, it was later considered weaponizing to consensual sex workers, though the stringency of the law has been useful in charging for sex trafficking. In Kelly’s case, these charges stem from 2015, when he had sex with more underage girls, allegedly giving one herpes. His plate is now full, with twenty-two federal criminal charges for allegedly sexually abusing eleven girls between the years of 1994 and 2018, along with four other indictments of sexual assault and abuse. He and his team still argue there’s a lack of evidence to implicate him.

  R. Kelly’s Facebook page is flooded with comments from female fans of all ages, not promoting his innocence but rather acknowledging his guilt and expressing their desire to be added to his diabolical harem. Young girls stating their age, asking to meet him along with older women willing to be the exception, are just a few examples of what happens when fame produces nefarious results. His abusive history is less of a timeline and more of a snowball: it started with a ten-to-twelve-year disparity in age, picking specific young girls and so-called dating them, though as he reached his thirties, forties, and fifties it evolved into a sex cult, complete with charges of sex trafficking and sexual abuse that has only escalated in vileness. It’s what happens when a court of law witnesses the patterns and still releases the perpetrator. Add to that global recognition and acclaim even during the mayhem: during the twenty-year span of R. Kelly’s sexual violence, he released thirteen albums (including a Christmas album in 2016 titled 12 Nights of Christmas), two collaborative projects with Jay-Z, went on eleven headlining tours and two co-headlining tours, released a memoir, and won nearly one hundred awards that include Grammy Awards, BET Awards, American Music Awards, Billboard Awards, and NAACP Image Awards, among many others. It’s impossible to see one’s own guilt when the rest of the world has turned a blind eye; only now in a post-#MeToo world are we now seeing some action. However, while his label, RCA Records, “parted ways” with Kelly following the release of Surviving R. Kelly and the #MuteRKelly campaign that followed, there is still a growing interest in the singer. Per Nielsen, following the airing of Surviving R. Kelly, his streaming data saw a 116 percent surge, jumping from 1.9 million streams on January 2, 2019, to a staggering 4.3 million streams by the following day. The enthusiasm for the music remains; though is this separating the artist from the art, and if so, how far do you separate the two?

  * * *

  Specifically to Aaliyah, it’s more a matter of reading between the lines when deciphering their
collective narrative, using parts of what was pattern behavior for Kelly. If there are known instances of R. Kelly’s sexual abuse in the double digits involving girls who have barely left their single-digit age, then what would lead anyone to believe that he somehow spared Aaliyah? There are a number of known observations between R. Kelly and Aaliyah that fall in line with his treatment of other survivors. It’s neither impossible nor inconceivable to put two and two together.

  His track record of impregnating young girls and forcing them into abortions would lead to the unfortunate presumption that he probably did get Aaliyah pregnant. And considering she was both underage and high profile, a quick marriage was the Band-Aid before an inevitable abortion. Per Van Allen, following Aaliyah’s abortion it was then that the marriage was annulled, though there was a six-month time frame between their marriage date of August 1994 and the rumored annulment date of February 1995.