This is a story about an entertainer named R. It is a story about the remarkable, but also very strange, pop talent he has. It is a story about the difficult places he came from and the ways they may, or may not, have shaped who he has become. It is also the story of a man who has been publicly accused r kelly confession song multiple sexual offenses with underage women, and who stood trial r kelly confession song making child pornography. He was eventually acquitted of that charge, and his career has continued uninterrupted, but for the most part he has evaded even the most basic questions that might help people understand what is true about him. When Robert Kelly was 3 years old, growing up poor with a single mother on Chicago's South Side, construction started on a building a few miles away in the center of town. It was to be called the Sears Tower, and for nearly 25 years it would be the tallest building in the world. The tower—which was actually renamed the Willis Tower in 2009, though many Chicagoans, including Kelly, still refer to it by its original name—would also come to play a complicated role in the psychic geography of the 48-year-old man sitting up here now, looking down upon the city and to Lake Michigan beyond. When Kelly was about 9, he and two friends rode their bicycles in from their neighborhood, and when they arrived, they challenged one another to stand next to this tower. Also, Kelly's elder brother had told them that if they got too close, it really would fall on them. The way he remembers it, his friends chickened out, but not him. I stood there for a long time. That's why I wanted to do this interview here. I wanted to be somebody. I wanted to be tall as the Sears Tower. I wanted to be on top of the Sears Tower. I wanted to be as strong as the Sears Tower feels. When my mom would be on the highway, I would always look at the Sears Tower as: That's where I want to go, that's where I want to be. Kelly have been brief, and restrictions have often been imposed, fences rung around the subjects he wouldn't discuss. As yet, I'm not really sure why he's changed his mind. The simplest reason, of course, would be that he's innocent of anything he has ever been accused of—in that case the mystery would be why he has sidestepped real conversations for so long. Though of course, not everyone who chooses to be silent is hiding something. Maybe, whatever the reason for his reticence, he has come to realize that it is doing him more harm than good. Maybe his times of trouble seem so far behind him that he can't see any way they can hurt him now. Maybe he's just convinced that R. Kelly can ride through any challenge. Maybe he's confident that he has a good answer for any question he'll face, or maybe he doesn't yet realize the kinds of questions that he will be facing. Maybe he hasn't thought it through at all. There's a common way that journalists often choose to approach encounters like this. Ask all the easy stuff first. Get on the subject's good side, get their confidence. Leave the tricky stuff until late in the last interview, when everything else is safely asked and answered, and then grab what you can. That's not how I'm doing this. First, if he isn't prepared to engage in some kind of serious discussion on the more difficult parts of his life, then I can't see how there can be a significant article about R. Kelly in 2016 that is worth printing. Second, it would make me feel spineless and undignified. I've read, listened to, and watched every other R. Kelly interview I could find, and too often what happens is that if interviewers mention anything at all, what they do is make a perfunctory little raid on the subject, touching it just to say they did. He knows, at least to some degree, what's coming. He's a grown man, 48 years old. He's stood on a thousand stages and sat through a criminal trial. I know it's not going to be a r kelly confession song conversation, but surely the most respectful way to have it is to get on and have it. The ninety-ninth floor appears to be completely bare. In the huge rectangular room where we meet, there are only two places to sit. One is on some sofas over in the far corner. Kelly r kelly confession song the other option. And so we sit facing each other, at a small round table set in the middle of the large empty space on the lakeward side of the tower, glass on three sides of us. It looks like a surreal over-the-top set for an interrogation scene in an action movie. Before we begin, Kelly tries to prop up his phone on the table between us, to record the conversation—I am as well—but it keeps sliding and falling over. First of all, before anything else, I want to talk with him about his childhood, and in particular some tough aspects of it that seem central to whom he has become. For one thing, his inability to read. My stepfather wasn't really interested in it one way or another. And my brothers and sisters were so young at the time they wouldn't do nothing but tease me about it. And then I would end up getting really sleepy and tired. And I can voice-text and say whatever I want to people. And then they text me back and I take my time and I can read through it. He grew up without a father, gone before Kelly was born, and his mother wouldn't talk about him. I would definitely say it affected me deeply as a young man, coming up. Who doesn't want a father. Those are the beginnings, and those are what can dictate the roads you choose in life, and choosing them well. He says that until he mentioned it in his 2012 memoir, Soulacoaster, he had never told anyone at all about the sexual abuse that he experienced. Not even his ex-wife Andrea. The more I became successful. Kelly the world would know—the one who would sell more than 30 million albums, have 36 Billboard Hot 100 hits, invent his own strange musical language, write hits for countless others, and conceive one of the weirdest syntheses of video and music of all time, Trapped in the Closet—would be someone else. A visual from him showing me his penis and all that stuff. He doesn't say this as though he expects it to be any kind of revelation to me, more as though he assumes I already know it. I wonder if he even realizes she wasn't described like that in the book. I remember closing my eyes or keeping my hands over my eyes. I remember those things, but couldn't judge it one way or the other fully. Then I started getting older and knowing that's just not supposed to happen—family members. And I think it started getting scary for them because I just started acting really different about it, and I think it became a turnoff to them, and a scary thing. As I'm older, I look at it and I know that it had to be not just about me and them, but them and somebody older than them when they were younger, and whatever happened to them when they were younger. I looked at it as if there was a sort of like, I don't know, a generational curse, so to speak, going down through the family. Not just started with her doing that to me. Kelly, a man who has been accused of multiple sexual offenses against underage girls, has just explained that he believes the sexual abuse he suffered is something that is passed down from generation to generation, so that in each new generation, victim becomes perpetrator. Once he has said these words, and they are hanging in the air between us, it just seems impossible to imagine that he won't at least address the obvious question—the question, he must surely realize, that anyone reading this would immediately ask: By that logic, wouldn't that make you the next in the cycle of child molesters. If only to disavow it r kelly confession song sidestep it. I know I'll need to return to this, but given the awfulness of what he is sharing, now is not the time. Obviously you know that in the cold light of day what they were doing was a crime. Do you wish they had been held to account for that. As I'm older, I've only learned to forgive it. But it's a family member that I love so I would definitely say no to that one. Do you relate to that. It teaches you to definitely be sexual earlier than you should have, than you're supposed to. You know, no different than putting a loaded gun r kelly confession song a kid's hand—he gonna grow up being a shooter, probably. I think it affects you tremendously when that happens at an early age. Your hormones are up more than they would normally be. There are no particularly easy ways to ask a man about his alleged relationships with underage girls, but at least the story of R. Kelly and Aaliyah offers a reasonably direct way in. Soon after his initial succ
