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. I’m still successful, and I’ve got an album out now, I’m gonna move on after this interview and go to the next interview.”
“Absolutely. But eventually they stopped being around me.”
Are they still around now?
“No, I haven’t seen them in so long.”
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.”
So what do you think family? Do you think that R. Kelly is suggesting that he has become the “perpertrator?” We applaud R. Kelly for sharing his pain and being honest about his sexual abuse. This has become a serious issue in our community, where family members and close friends who have easy access to our children. If there’s anything to gain is that, the effort to stop this kind of abuse has to start with your own family and to educate your children so that they are aware of what is happening, and how to prevent it from continuing to happen.
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