Photo-Illustration: by The Cut; Photo: Lifetime On this week’s episode of The Cut, senior writer Angelina Chapin and co-host Jazmín Aguilera talk about and talk with Sparkle , who first reported R. Kelly to the police for allegedly sexually abusing her 14-year-old niece. Back then, no one believed her, but following the explosive documentary Surviving R. Kelly and the R&B artist’s trial, at the end of which he was found guilty of nine federal sex crimes, she’s been vindicated.
SPARKLE: So I would give calls to my sister and say, “Hey, I’m hearing rumblings. You may want to check this out. Your niece is down here at the studio by herself, with no parental guidance. She’s just here wandering the halls.” And not to say that I thought something was going on at that time. The studio has a bunch of seedy things happening in different rooms. It could be drinking, smoking, just the whole gamut.SPARKLE: “Oh no, she’s fine. That’s her godfather … everything is fine.
SPARKLE: He called my home phone, don’t ask me how people were getting my home phone number, I do not know.SPARKLE: I was horrified and I was disgusted. It’s one thing to hear things but to actually see. It’s a different thing. SPARKLE: It floored me, absolutely floored me. Because we were very close, like very, very close. But you’re mad at me for what? How could you not want to put this man where he belongs?SPARKLE: I don’t have an answer. I want an answer to that.
SPARKLE: I think first I called my sister-in-law because she was a cop. She was a Chicago cop at the time. She informed me what to do. I called the authorities. Some detectives came out, took my statement And they told me that their hands were tied. Another thing is that the tapes were being bootlegged. They were being sold on street corners. This was something that people thought was funny and kinky and something that they could just watch in their dark, basements, not something he should go to trial for. It was just a twisted reaction from the culture and it was made into a pop-culture moment rather than a crime.
ANGELINA: Yeah, she did testify. You can imagine, throughout this trial how much would she wants to just be able to know what her niece and her family are going through, but she had no access to the most affected people and no way of finding solace in one another. She’s just completely iced out. ANGELINA: I think of Sparkle as one of the OG whistleblowers with R.Kelly. I mean, there’s the journalist at the Chicago Sun-Times who has broken open this story and made it widely accessible to the public. But Sparkle sort of alongside him was always saying “R. Kelly abuses children. My niece was one of his victims and this video is not funny.” This is criminal evidence and she’s been ringing the alarm bell for the past two decades and faced some very serious consequences for doing so.
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