In a 2016 interview with GQ, R. Kelly sat down with writer Chris Heath, and agreed not to hold back on revealing his truths. Although there are many moments where it is obvious that R. Kelly does hold back, and even admits that he won’t talk about specific things, Kelly was straightforward about his sexual experiences as a child, as he also was in his book, “Soulacoaster.”

The now-imprisoned R. Kelly 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. Check out excerpts from his interview below.

On not having a father in his life:

“If I could change anything, I would definitely have had a father around. My father. I would definitely say it affected me deeply as a young man, coming up. Who doesn’t want a father? Those are the beginnings, and those are what can dictate the roads you choose in life, and choosing them well. And it affected me.”

R. Kelly never told a soul about the sexual abuse he endured, until his 2012 memoir, “Soulacoaster”:

It was something he “put so far in the back of my mind that I even forgot about it.” This wasn’t the history he wanted for the person he was becoming: “As I got older, the more I just didn’t want it to be in my past. The more I became successful.” He was determined that the R. Kelly the world would know—the one who would sell more than 30 million albums, have 36 Billboard Hot 100 hits, invent his own strange musical language, write hits for countless others, and conceive one of the weirdest syntheses of video and music of all time, Trapped in the Closet—would be someone else. “I didn’t want that to be something that was in my luggage once I got to my success home, so to speak.”

R. Kelly says he had several sexual violations done to him as a child, including one by a trusted, male family friend who tried to persuade him to ‘masturbate him for money,’ which R. Kelly says he refused:

“It was a crazy weird experience,” he tells me. “But not a full-blown experience, because it didn’t go down. Contact sexual—no. A visual—absolutely. A visual from him showing me his penis and all that stuff.” But he describes in his memoir how the full-on sexual abuse that lasted for several years (it was oral sex the first time, though he tells me it soon became intercourse) started one day when Kelly fell asleep in front of the TV and was awoken from “a crazy dream about Three’s Company” to find a woman playing with him:

I tried to push her away, but she wouldn’t stop until she was finished. When she was, she said, “You better not say sh*t to no one or else you gonna get a terrible whupping.”

The book says nothing about how this woman was connected to Kelly, other than implying that she was a regular presence in their home, but while we talk he refers to her as a relative. He doesn’t say this as though he expects it to be any kind of revelation to me, more as though he assumes I already know it. I wonder if he even realizes she wasn’t described like that in the book.

“At first, I couldn’t judge it,” he says to me, when I ask him if he realized at the time that a really bad thing was happening. “I remember it feeling weird. I remember feeling ashamed. I remember closing my eyes or keeping my hands over my eyes. I remember those things, but couldn’t judge it one way or the other fully.”

And did that change over time?

“Over time, yeah. I remember actually, after a couple of years, looking forward to it sometimes. You know, acting like I didn’t, but did.”

How often would the abuse happen?

“Oh wow. It became a regular thing. Every other day, every other week.”

How many years did it go on for?

“As far as I can remember, about [age] 7 or 8 to maybe 14, 15. Something like that.”

Did anything in particular make it stop?

“When I started having a girlfriend, I felt really bad about it. Then I started getting older and knowing that’s just not supposed to happen—family members. And I think it started getting scary for them because I just started acting really different about it, and I think it became a turnoff to them, and a scary thing.”

Was the person doing this still around in your life?

“People can say, ‘Hey, well, he’s just trying to protect hisself.’ Well, I have nothing to protect myself from. …
“Absolutely. But eventually they stopped being around me.”

Are they still around now?

“No, I haven’t seen them in so long.”

What Happened When He Confronted His Abuser

Did you ever have a discussion with them about it?

“Tried to, but.”

How long ago was that?

“Maybe eight, nine years ago. Didn’t want to talk about it. Didn’t own up to it. Told me, ‘Sometime when you’re kids, you think you’ve been through something, or did something, that you didn’t do, probably was a dream.’ Things like that. But it was definitely not a dream.”

They’re an actual blood relative?

“Yeah. Yeah.”

What do you think now about what they did?

“I, well, definitely forgive them. As I’m older, I look at it and I know that it had to be not just about me and them, but them and somebody older than them when they were younger, and whatever happened to them when they were younger. I looked at it as if there was a sort of like, I don’t know, a generational curse, so to speak, going down through the family. Not just started with her doing that to me.”

ILOSM family, do you think that R. Kelly is suggesting that he has become the “perpetrator?”  His details about the sexual abuse he endured as a child – though disheartening – sure does likely explain a lot about the man he became later in life.

If there’s anything to gain from this, it’s that, the effort to stop this kind of sexual abuse has to start with our own families, by educating our children so that they are aware of what is happening, and how to prevent it.