R. Kelly Photo: E. JASON WAMBSGANS/AFP via Getty Images Over nearly three decades, rumors of R. Kelly’s predation crystallized into an open secret. Somehow, the singer’s reputation withstood a brief marriage to a teenager in the ’90s and a video of him seemingly having sex with a different minor in the early aughts that resulted in child-pornography charges.
He “used every trick in the predator handbook,” Maria Cruz Melendez, an assistant U.S. attorney, said during opening arguments. “He began collecting girls and women as if they were things, hoarding them like objects that he could use however he liked.
“He slapped me and choked me until I passed out,” Pace said, recalling one instance when she failed to meet Kelly’s greeting standards. “I remember him just putting his hand around my neck.” And before he allegedly forced her into sex, she said, “[he] spit in my face and told me to put my head down in shame.”
A former assistant testified to Kelly’s strict house rules. On August 20, a former low-level assistant for Kelly starting in 2007 — Anthony Navarro — compared the environment at Kelly’s Illinois mansion to The Twilight Zone. “You went into the gate and it was just a different world. Just a strange place,” Navarro said. He allegedly chauffeured women at Kelly’s direction, but said he was “not supposed to talk to them.
Jane also accused Kelly of giving her genital herpes, saying she received her diagnosis at age 17 after experiencing extreme internal discomfort during sex. “It got to the point I couldn’t physically even walk,” she testified, adding that when she told Kelly, he “was agitated and told me I could have gotten that from anyone. I told him I had only been intimate with him.” When the outbreaks worsened and interfered with sex, he allegedly told her she was “broken.
But arguably the most astounding detail from Jane’s testimony so far is her allegation that Kelly forced her to smear feces on her face and “put it in my mouth and act like I liked, enjoyed that.” Jane said Kelly filmed the scene as punishment, and that he threatened to make her do another take because she didn’t seem “into it enough.”
“He would raise his voice at me and could put the fear of God in me very quickly,” she continued. He sometimes recorded their sexual encounters, and often forced her into specific positions, she alleged, occasionally leaving the room for hours. If she wasn’t still holding her pose when he returned, she said, he would become enraged.
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