Guilty! R. Kelly could spend the rest of his life trapped in a Federal closet

The Tuesday Talking Points

At long last, Robert Sylvester Kelly, the R&B legend better known by his performing name "R.Kelly," was convicted by a federal jury in New York of racketeering and eight counts of the federal anti-sex trafficking law known as the Mann Act.

While Kelly was formally convicted in a court of law yesterday, he was convicted in my informal (and highly subjective) court of private opinion long ago. 

Kelly and the late Aaliyah D. Haughton circa '94

Back in 2002, when one of my interns from Florida A&M University came to my office with a bootleg copy of an alleged R. Kelly sex tape, it didn't take us very long at all to surmise that it certainly was Kelly on the grainy VHS tape—and that he certainly was molesting an adolescent child on the same. I ejected the tape and tore it up, explaining in the process to my three interns, two who have since become lawyers, that the tape was contraband—and that it was illegal to possess child pornography. But from that day forward, Kelly, a musical genius whose ballads had been in heavy rotation on my mix tapes and CD's, was banished from my ears.

The anecdotal evidence suggests that my cancelling Kelly that morning placed me in the minority; to this very day, his music is still heavily featured on streaming services like Spotify; social media groups dedicated to his art still have millions of followers, and the comments section of articles about the trial and yesterday's verdict are filled with ardent supporters who blame everyone and everything but Robert Kelly for his pending imprisonment.

R. Kelly’s Facebook page has 8.6 million followers

Now, there were whispers that Kelly was a child molester way back in the 90s, when he burst onto the scene making hit records for himself, Michael Jackson, Celine Dion, Changing Faces, and a teenage girl that he called his protege, Aaliyah. Thinking back to that period, college friends of mine from Kelly's hometown of Chicago told me that it was a well-known thing that Kelly would hang out around high schools, malls, and McDonald's restaurants scoping out young girls to entice with his money, fame, and ability to help those with musical talent to break into the business. 

Which brings me back to Aaliyah; last month, as the 20th anniversary of her tragic death in a plane crash drew near, I stumbled across a YouTube post of an early 90s BET interview featuring her with R. Kelly when she was 15-years-old and he was 27. What struck me like a bolt of lightning was that after listening to other interviews over the years of witnesses who alleged that they saw Kelly performing acts of molestation upon Aaliyah, as I watched the old BET interview and observed the looks that Kelly and Aaliyah exchanged, their body language, and their overall on-air demeanor, I was further convinced that Kelly was, at that time, molesting Aaliyah in the same horrid fashion that he would later molest the 12-year-old child that was featured on that infamous sextape. Such is why Kelly, who we have come to learn was a master manipulator of those within his orbit, married his "protege" in a sham wedding to cover up the fact that a child could not consent to sex. 

Through the years, whenever a new documentary or court hearing about Kelly aired or was reported, one of the first arguments that his supporters purvey has been that if Kelly was guilty, so, too, were the girls and their parents. There is alot to unpack with this pseudo-defense, but suffice it to say that those who claim such are willfully blind about how sexual molestation and statutory rape charges work. Meaning, the onus in such prosecutions is squarely upon the adult—not the child, no matter if said child "seemed like they were ready," to paraphrase Kelly, to perform sexual acts. 

As to the parents, while those parents who knowingly allowed their children to be molested by Kelly are absolutely morally deplorable, their deplorability in no way, shape, or form mitigates the fact that Kelly, a fully grown man, CHOSE to molest girls who were not mentally mature enough by law to be ensnared in his malefic tangled web of sexual degradation. 

What has always struck me as bizarre is how some of these Kelly supporters, particularly the Black males, probably would be the main ones wanting to kill some molester or rapist if it was their own mother, daughter, or close significant other that had been attacked. And yet, they are quick to call a 12-year old a "fast-tailed girl," instead of blaming the older man who is sexually attracted to a child. To this point, yesterday, when a Spelman Sister of mine asked Black men on my verdict post what they would have done if Kelly had sexually assaulted (or kidnapped, beaten with belts and hands, and pimped out) an adolescent family member of theirs, I cooly responded that Kelly never would have made it to trial...

That Kelly was never handled in this manner by some mad dad is troubling to Ol’ Hobbs…

Thus, my continuing disappointment with my Black Brothers who believe that sexual molestation and assault in the Black community should be overlooked. Their twisted logic is that if white men like Roman Polanski, Woody Allen, Hugh Hefner, Prince Andrew, and former Presidents Bill Clinton and Donald Trump can be accused of sexual assault and never serve any time, then Black men like R. Kelly and Bill Cosby deserve passes, too. Well, I don’t know about how my readers were raised, but in the Hobbs house while growing up, on the one occasion that I got into some trouble in the neighborhood and came home saying, “but so and so did it too,” the punishment I got was that much more severe for my being a blind follower—and not a leader. 

The problem with the Kelly defenders, though, is that far too many Black folks, especially Black men of a certain mindset, prefer to focus on race and racism than they do Black toxic masculinity, Black toxic patriarchy, and Black male sexual violence against Black women and girls. These ones misconstrue real miscarriages of justice, like Black men who were falsely accused of raping white women and lynched during Jim Crow, with real acts of rape that some Black men have legitimately committed upon women and girls, both then and now. 

For those who willfully conflate the two, there is no amount of evidence that will ever convince them that a rape occurred because deep down, some are misogynists who despise women or, in some cases, despise themselves because while they pretend to be macho heterosexuals, they are bitter and "trapped in the closet," like Kelly once sang, or perhaps even wish that they could be women. 

Regrettably, from time immemorial, the subject of Black sexual assault has been damned near taboo in Black homes and Black churches, so much so that in 1985, when I saw “The Color Purple” in 8th grade, my 13-year-old brain was aghast by the idea that a Black father or step-father would ever molest or produce children with his own child. I was so naive because I had been led to believe that such perversions were stuff that “they” (read-white folks) did–not Black folks. Well, a lifetime of experiences soon taught me that such was far from the truth and that many Black women carry baggage about molestation and rapes that no one was ever held to account.

Alice Walker's classic, “The Color Purple,” set to the silver screen by Steven Spielberg, exposed Black sexual violence in raw terms…

While the docket on R. Kelly will be fully closed after he faces trials back in the Midwest, assuming that those cases go forward after he is sentenced to multiple decades of imprisonment in New York, I still think it critically necessary that we discuss how there are legions of other "R. Kelly's" who are making life miserable for girls and boys that they prey upon across America. 

Like abortion, the issue of rape is tough for many to reconcile because when we scatch deep beneath the surface, there are so many Black adults who have been molested at some point in their lives and instead of confronting their attacker, they have second guessed themselves for years by believing that if they had dressed differently or behaved differently, that maybe, just maybe, they would not have been molested or raped. That is one of the most saddening aspects of Black culture to me, the whole blame the victim instead of the molester or rapist mentality that not only causes victims to suffer in silence, but in its worst form, has some former victims turning their backs on other victims and shaming them for experiences that were the sole fault of the abusive molester or rapist. 

Lest we forget....