Another woman has come forward with allegations of years-long abuse with R. Kelly, in a new and illuminating feature with Rolling Stone.
Kitti Jones, a former hip-hop DJ in Dallas, Texas, engaged in a relationship (if you can call it that) with the singer from 2011 until her escape in 2013.
The piece paints a terrifying picture of creeping abuse and domestic violence. The relationship started out normally enough: Jones met Kelly at an afterparty, they exchanged numbers, and spent two months texting. Kelly paid for Jones to fly to Denver, where he was playing a gig, to see him. and that’s when things started to get uncomfortable.
“He brushed past me [upon arriving]. I’m thinking we’re going to hug or peck each other. But he plopped down on the couch and pulled out his penis and started pleasuring himself.
“I was attracted to him and was just like, ‘Well, OK. Fine.’ Maybe he just has weird ways of getting off.
“He was like a drill sergeant even when he was pleasuring me. He was telling me how to bend my back or move my leg here. I’m like, ‘Why is he directing it like this?’ It was very uncomfortable.”
Later that year, he moved her to his Trump Tower apartment in Chicago, and things digressed.
Jones was not allowed to speak to another man, and all those who moved in Kelly’s circles were trained not to speak to her. She had to keep Kelly informed via text of her whereabouts at all times. She was only allowed to where baggy track pants when she went out in public, and had to ask him or his employees for permission to do even the smallest tasks. On sample provided to Rolling Stone? “Daddy, I need to go to the restroom.”
[Kelly has denied that their relationship was anything other than a consensual one between two adults; Rolling Stone has interviewed multiple people close to the situation who back-up Jones’ account.]
He first got physical after she saw the video at the centre of his child-pornography trial and confronted him about it, but it wasn’t the last time.
He later moved her into his studio, where the abuse got even worse (she later found out it was so he could move another girl into his apartment). She was kept there with several other girls, but they hardly interacted, being confined to their rooms for most of the day and needing permission to leave or eat. Food started to be withheld; Jones said the longest she went without food was two and a half days, but that entire days without food weren’t uncommon.
There was also coercive sex, which in the last six months of her time with Kelly including coerce sex with other women.
“You can’t say no because you’re going to get punished. You just become numb to what’s happening. It’s so traumatic the things that he makes you do to other people and to him.
“He videotapes everything that he does, and sometimes he’ll just make you watch what he’s done to other girls or girls that he had be together. He would masturbate to that and then have you give him oral sex while he’s watching what he did with somebody else on his iPad.
“It was just a game for him. He just went back and forth [on them] when he was peeing and told [another girlfriend] to clean it up afterwards. That was the worst that I’ve ever seen.”
In September 2013 she finally escaped, pretending to visit her son in Dallas and simply never coming back. But she stayed in contact with Kelly, finding it hard to let go, and says the conversations were amicable.
Two months later he came to Dallas for a show, and arranged to see her on the pretence of giving her stuff back. When she got on his tour bus, he started attacking her.
“I knew he wasn’t going to kill me, but it was a lot of force. I was thinking, ‘I’m not going to call the police.’ I just felt so stupid.
“[He was] instilling the fear back in me. When a person sees that you’re not calling the police or the press on them … it’s like, ‘Let me make my mark so you’ll be afraid.’ And it worked.”
She’s since been rebuilding her life, attempting to reignite her career as a radio DJ. She even tried helping the parents of another girl who lived with Kelly get their daughter back, but to no avail.
In July this year, BuzzFeed News published interviews with three members of Kelly’s inner circle, alleging he was holding six young women in a “cult” and using promises of singing careers and record deals to lure them in.
The publication also interviewed the same parents whom Jones was trying to help, who told police their daughter “was being held against her will”.
“It was as if she was brainwashed,” the mother told BuzzFeed of the last time she saw her daughter. “[She] looked like a prisoner — it was horrible. I hugged her and hugged her. But she just kept saying she’s in love and [Kelly] is the one who cares for her. I don’t know what to do. I hope that if I get her back, I can get her treatment for victims of cults. They can reprogram her. But I wish I could have stopped it from happening.”
You can (and should) read Rolling Stone’s full interview with Jones here.
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