Soulless: The Case Against R. Kelly

by Jim DeRogatis

all my sources confirmed Kelly’s difficulties not only with reading but with basic math.

Residents in the city of Studs Terkel and Nelson Algren, Ethel Payne and Sandra Cisneros, Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert are real people who sneer at pretensions and “people who think who they are.”

“I said hello to someone, and he took me outside and he just smacked me,” she said. “I didn’t understand why, but basically, the instruction was, ‘When you’re sitting at the table, you only look at me and you only talk to me.’”

On this tape, which we never saw, Kelly had sex with a Chicago woman in her early twenties, gospel singer Deleon Richards, according to the FBI. Richards had been a star since age five, and she held the distinction of being the youngest artist ever nominated for a Grammy. In 1999, she married Gary Sheffield, the Los Angeles Dodgers’ (later New York Yankees’) star outfielder.

When Mary Mitchell talked to Andrea’s mother, grandfather, and aunt, they said Kelly didn’t allow them to visit her at home, and he didn’t permit Andrea to speak to them on the phone.

“Every famous nigga that gets arrested is not Nelson Mandela. Yes, the government conspires to put a lot of innocent black men in jail on fallacious charges. But R. Kelly is not one of those men.”

Consciously or not, some people love him and his music because of, not despite his predatory behavior.

Some of the parents of Kelly’s victims need to be added to the list of enablers, too.

everyone should be a critic. Why? Because art matters, damn it! It changes the world because it changes us. We all need to be investigative critics, to think about whether the art we embrace lives up to the ideals by which we live, and to call it out when it doesn’t.

When Chicago decides to fuck with you, you are well and truly fucked.

veteran assistant Milton “June” Brown,

Kelly was aware of that earlier scandal, but unfazed by it. “Look at Jerry Lee Lewis,” he said, according to testimony from Jane Doe No. 3, who was seventeen when Kelly raped her, in 1999. “He’s a genius and I’m a genius, and we should be allowed to do whatever we want because of what we give to the world.”