“I’m a Good Person”

When you’re R. Kelly, things just seem to materialize.

Tonight, he is in Harry’s Velvet Room, a gilded and silk-swagged subterranean champagne lounge in the Near North Side district of his hometown, Chicago. Fresh from his daily game of midnight basketball in a suburban gym — a clean towel still slung over his shoulder, his T-shirt neatly pressed and creased — he suddenly finds himself clutching a bottle of Moët someone has thrust into his fist. Then a fifth of Hennessy, then a beaker of the weird, fruity liqueur Hpnotiq. He swigs the Hpnotiq from the bottle.

A cigar appears between his fingers; a moment later a lighter emerges from the crowd. If he is hungry, a crab cake or a tiny nibble of goat cheese already rests in his palm. The local trust-fund kids, the entourages of lesser celebrities, even the formidable Ruff Ryders posse — all seem to arrange themselves in concentric semicircles that radiate around his chair, approaching one at a time as if to kiss his diamond-encrusted ring.

Women, too, fall into R. Kelly’s orbit at the Velvet Room. So he finds his arm comfortably snaked for a moment around a Pilates-honed waist or a fragrant shoulder of a girl he has never met. After a while, the women around Kelly begin to seem as blandly interchangeable as the trip-hop grooves the club’s DJ will not stop playing. But they must be comforting in their sheer numbers.

“This town loves R. Kelly,” says Joaquin Dean, CEO of Ruff Ryders Inc., mock-slapping himself in awe. “They do not…give…a damn.”


Outside the privileged midnight world bound by the velvet rope, though, life has been very different for Robert Sylvester Kelly. For nearly a decade — almost since the beginning of his solo R&B career in 1993 — he has been surrounded by darkening rumors of his compulsion for sex with underage girls. Lawsuits have been filed against him by a string of different women — schoolgirls, aspiring singers and rappers, a record-company intern — some of whom allege they were seduced by Kelly when they were 15 or 16. One claimed he coaxed her into having an abortion. Some suits were settled out of court; two are still pending.

None of it seemed to touch him. In August 1994, he married the then 15-year-old singer Aaliyah in a Chicago hotel room, having falsified the marriage certificate to make her 18. Aaliyah’s family separated them, the marriage was annulled and she never saw him again. Authorities didn’t investigate the case, and the scandal ultimately evaporated: The following year, he produced a number 1 single for Michael Jackson and hits for Céline Dion and Toni Braxton; in 1996, he had his biggest hit, the ubiquitous inspirational anthem “I Believe I Can Fly.” It won three Grammys.

Things began to unravel only at the end of 2000, when the Chicago Sun-Times published an exposé of Kelly’s history of pursuing young girls. But by that time, the Special Investigations Unit of the Chicago police had already been examining his case for two years.

At the beginning of 2001, a videotape was mailed anonymously to the newspaper. It showed a man alleged to be Kelly having sex with a young girl in a wood-paneled sauna room similar to those in both of his Chicago homes. Then, in February 2002, days before Kelly’s performance at the opening ceremony of the Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City, a second tape appeared in the Sun-Times’s mailroom. That tape contained the now-infamous 26 minutes of footage of a man who looks very much like Kelly having sex with — and urinating on — a girl who police say was no older than 14 at the time. By the end of the month, VHS copies of the tape could be bought on streets across the United States for $10 a pop.

Finally, on June 5, 2002, Robert S. Kelly was arrested outside his rented house in Davenport, Florida, charged with 21 counts of taping and producing, and enticing a minor to participate in, child pornography. He later surrendered to police in Chicago and was released on $750,000 bail. Kelly has denied that he is the man in the video, and his defense team has said that the girl on the tape was over 18. Regardless, Kelly is not permitted to leave Cook County, Illinois, without first seeking the permission of the court.


There will always be teenagers looking to get into trouble, and there will always be celebrities willing to oblige them. Blender has tagged along on rock tours where all manner of debauchery took place in plain sight. Much of it, in all likelihood, involved women as young as the woman on the “R. Kelly Sex Tape.” Pop stars, famously, function as America’s collective id; sex, drugs and rock & roll are not grouped by accident.

If it is indeed R. Kelly on that tape — and many people believe it is — he was terrifyingly oblivious to the potential consequences of what he was doing. But what is especially astonishing about the video is that its star keeps mugging for the camera, fiddling with the angle to show his genitals to maximum advantage, switching from one sexual act to the next with something like precision, yet appearing not so much gleeful as profoundly, miserably bored. This is not a man — whoever he might be — being taped against his will.

“People can say whatever they want about you without knowing the facts,” says Kelly, settled into a chair in a hotel suite 20 floors above Lake Michigan. “They can criticize you without even knowing you, and hate you when they don’t even know you. All of a sudden, you’re, like, the bin Laden of America. Osama bin Laden is the only one who knows exactly what I’m going through.”

It’s close to 5 in the morning, and Kelly’s entourage is still at least a dozen strong: tour dancers, a makeup artist, an executive who would like Kelly to produce another few songs for the boy band B2K and some buddies who rode the mile from the club to the hotel in Kelly’s Hummer, which sports a giant flat-screen TV stretched behind the front seat.

Kelly — call him Rob, he says — has the expensively buff, rangy presence of a pro athlete, which you wouldn’t expect if you had seen him only on MTV. But he also cultivates a sort of vaporousness, the actor’s gift for melting into the shadows. He looks unstarry enough to be a member of his own entourage.

Kelly has been counseled by his cabinet of attorneys and handlers not to discuss with Blender any particulars of the pending court case, or of his sexual history in general. In stepping around the topics, he refers often to God and repeatedly compares the way he employs sex in his songs to the use of violence in action movies. When asked about Andrea Lee, his wife of seven years, he says, mechanically, “I don’t really talk about her.” Only after 20 minutes or so does he relax into something approaching conversation.

He has finally made it up here to be interviewed, 11 hours late, after a night spent much like any other. He usually wakes up around sunset, heads out for dinner at McDonald’s, plays fiercely competitive basketball in a gym near his suburban home until 1 or 1:30 A.M., then spends the next several hours in the studio before crashing sometime between 10 A.M. and noon. Tonight, with a couple of fresh BET awards and countless hours of unreleased music in the can, he is taking a rare few hours off from recording to talk to Blender.

As the pink dawn breaks behind him, a friend hands Kelly a room-service menu, which he scans and hands back in disgust. He sends an associate out for White Castle hamburgers. “Enough for everyone, you hear?” He beams — a job well done. What Kelly knows, what everyone in the room knows but dares not acknowledge, is that these White Castle dawns may not last forever: His trial is expected to begin in October or November.

For the last year, as his personal life began to disintegrate, Kelly has been on an extraordinary professional roll. He has worked at a furious pace, writing, recording and producing a mountain of material — his hit singles “Ignition,” “Snake” and “Thoia Thoing”; Ginuwine’s “Hell Yeah” — that includes some of the best, most libidinous music he has ever made. For the man whose credits include such sex-drunk classics as “Feelin’ on Yo Booty” and “Bump n’ Grind,” that’s no small compliment.

How do you manage to concentrate on music with all the turbulence that’s surrounding you?

“A lot of it,” he says, cupping his chin in a tired hand, “has to do with the whole drama going on around R. Kelly. If you tell me on the court that we’ve got an hour to make a basket, I’m going to take my time. But if you tell me the pressure’s on, tell me I’ve got two minutes, then I’m going to focus. Everything’s like that with me. When I have a little pressure on me, my passion starts to feed my talent.”

Kelly says he’s been buried in the studio for six months, working constantly. Ideas for songs come to him all the time: in the kitchen, in the bathroom, on the basketball court. When he hears something in his head, he’ll just stop the game and take out his Dictaphone.

“I love music, and music loves me back. We’re kind of married, and I’m pregnant by music. I have three to four years’ worth of work you’ve never heard in the vaults. I’ve come up with at least 20 to 25 albums.”

Do you feel as though you’re working toward some sort of deadline, given what’s coming up?

“Not really. I’m just finishing up. I have a lot of DATs to finish up, collaborations and things.”

What’s it like being R. Kelly right now?

“It’s hard being me. But it’s always been hard being me. It’s hard to be famous and free. Everybody wants to know: ‘What are you going to write?’ People assume that what I say in a song shows what kind of person I am…how good or bad I am.

“That’s what I love about Marvin Gaye: He never held any punches. If he felt sexual, he was just going to say, straight-out bold: ‘Let’s Get It On.’ You know, I’m a male, and I’ve got an idea of what women want to hear, and also what men want to tell their women. And I don’t believe in doing a ballad that just talks about love.”

R. Kelly spits out this last word as if no concept could be any less appealing.


A week earlier, outside the dressing rooms at this summer’s BET Awards in Hollywood, nobody would talk about R. Kelly and his troubles. Erykah Badu put a finger to her lips when Blender asked about him. 50 Cent, at the head of a flying wedge of hired muscle, blew by without slowing. Missy Elliott ducked back into her dressing room. Beyoncé Knowles’s posse wouldn’t let the question of R. Kelly get within 20 feet of her, and Jay-Z looked at Blender as though we had stepped in something evil.

Kelly himself skipped the stroll down the red carpet. Yet when he rolled onstage with his dancers, the women in the audience screamed, and when he won the award for Best R&B Singer, the women screamed some more. BET recognized the drama and scheduled Kelly as the final performer. In his acceptance speech, he remarked how proud he was that black people had stuck together behind him.

“I’m at my best when I’m wanted,” Kelly says, “and I’m no good when I’m not. That’s my kryptonite, when I’m not wanted. They showed me a lot of love.”

R. Kelly’s people, the family of musicians with whom he surrounds himself, clearly adore him. B2K tell everyone he’s the best producer in the world. Tyrese, for whom Kelly produced the track “Pick Up the Phone” for the 2 Fast 2 Furious soundtrack, says he’s a genius, so dedicated that he’ll stay up for three days in a row working lest he miss out on something.

“He’s the real-deal R&B king,” Tyrese says. “No other singer in the history of R&B has spent so much time making hits for other people.”

But even some of Kelly’s most ardent fans have become cynical. Take LaTiisha from Duncanville, Texas, who paid more than $100 and sat for more than three hours to hear Kelly perform an abbreviated 20-minute set at a concert benefiting a charity founded by Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban that aids the families of U.S. soldiers killed or gravely injured in Iraq. “The man’s a genius,” LaTiisha tells Blender. “But here’s some advice: Next time, he’d better check ID.”

“None of this really hurts me,” Kelly says. “It’s like a party. If there’s too much promotion, you got a line all the way down the block, people can’t get in, the police trying to shut the damned party down — because you overpromoted it. Right now, I’m being overpromoted. It’s gotten so big,” he adds, “you might just as well lock me up.”

Kelly says that these days he spends a lot of time talking to the Reverend James Meeks, a Chicago-based community leader who’s his pastor, his spiritual advisor and the man who sat beside him throughout the BET interview he gave last year proclaiming his innocence.

“We chat after church sometimes; we talk during the week about everything that’s going on and how I feel about it. We just get into God and the whole nine. Then I get into the studio — I’m always in the studio — and stay busy with my music. What’s the sense of hearing a lot of lies and rumors about yourself?

“My mama always told me that the higher you go, you’re going to pay a price,” he continues. “And you’ve got to believe that God’s got your back. She told me this way back, when I was recording my second album. And I listened. You know, I grew up in a house full of women.” Kelly reaches into a White Castle sack and insists that Blender share his cold fries. “I never saw my father. I was raised by my mom, my grandmother, my great-grandmother. My mom was pretty much like me. Loving of people, all colors, all castes, wanting to be around people and have fun. She sang. She could really sing. We were like best friends.”

His voice softens almost to a whisper. Although this moment, when Kelly collapses into tears at the thought of his late mother, is familiar to anybody who has ever been to one of his concerts, his sadness feels very real.

“She knew,” he says. “She called me a genius, you know. The same thing any mama calls her son whether he has a gift or not, really. But she was always thankful for the gift of life.”

His voice catches in a sob, and he turns away toward the window, watching the first sailboats of the day make their way onto the lake.

“There’s a lot of people going through a lot of things right now that are deeper than me, you know. I see kids and people starving; a baby just died the other day from starvation. People think I’m going through something — but I know God is real. My own situation is not so heavy. We’ll be all right.”

Right now, R. Kelly leads the life of a celebrity litigant: touring whenever a judge will grant him permission to do so, writing and recording new tracks for labelmate Britney Spears, readying his first greatest-hits collection and preparing for his trial.

If he’s found guilty, Kelly could face a lifetime in jail as the United States’ most infamous sex offender.

He says he isn’t planning his life assuming the prosecution will succeed.

“I can’t think like that. Because I have to think good. I’m a good person. Good people think good; they think positive. That’s why they do good. You’ve got to understand: When you’re a celebrity at my level, the game gets harder. I’m in life’s boxing ring. I go in there expecting to get hit. You don’t train to get in there and not get hit — you take the punches. So I’m taking a few punches, but I can’t think this is going to knock me out,” he says. “I can’t think like that.”