The strength of the #MeToo movement has brought about a resurgence in trying to bring predators to justice, but many have escaped its grasp for years. In the case of R. Kelly, it’s been decades. This new documentary series produced by Lifetime, from filmmaker and cultural critic Dream Hampton, attempts to redirect our newly found outrage on behalf of black women and girls, and towards one of the powerful men who’s been hiding in plain sight since the early 1990’s.
The six-part series chronicles R&B artist and producer R. Kelly’s childhood, in which he is portrayed though his own words and those of his younger brother, to have been a victim of sexual abuse himself, who then grew up to become an abuser, as he began preying on teenage girls from his own former high school as early as his twenties. After finding success in the music industry in Chicago, he quickly used his status as a powerful artist with a posse of assistants and managers around him to recruit young girls who wanted to break into the industry, gain their trust and solicit sexual favors from them, turning them subservient to him. Like most predators, he preyed on the weak, girls from underprivileged families, and groomed them to become submissive to him as he showered them with attention, gifts, material riches and promises of big futures.
The documentary employs interviews with Kelly’s family members, former assistants and managers, revealing just how openly he indulged in his abusive and predatory lifestyle, with a cadre of men surrounding him who enabled and facilitated this behavior, assisting in the recruitment of girls as young as 12, from as far back as the early 90’s. Like others of his ilk (Michael Jackson comes to mind) many incidents played out in plain sight, such as his 1994 marriage to his 15-year-old protege Aaliyah, when he was 27, to the infamous “pee tape” of him urinating on a 14-year-old that found its way onto the internet and became a massive scandal in 2002. Throughout the scandals, R. Kelly produced hits that made him more or less untouchable in the industry, allowing the larger public to brush aside his behavior, as the black community remained somewhat polarized, always an issue when celebrity and wealth is involved, as we know.