The allegations that R&B singer-songwriter R. Kelly is a serial pedophile — and an abuser of women, period — keeps rearing its head at regular intervals. And the prolific hit-maker keeps on issuing denials.
The issue just won’t go away, however. The Guardian reports that the television station BBC3 is debuting a documentary on March 28 about the disgraced R&B singer featuring former lover Kittie Jones, now 34, who says he groomed girls as young as 14 to become his “pets.”
Jones says she trained to indulge in all of Robert Kelly’s sexual proclivities, which included having sex with other women and girls.
The publication said she told BBC3 that “I was introduced to one of the girls, that he told me he ‘trained’ since she was 14, those were his words. I saw that she was dressed like me, that she was saying the things I’d say and her mannerisms were like mine. That’s when it clicked in my head that he had been grooming me to become one of his pets. He calls them his pets.”
Jones said Kelly called them pets and treated them as such. He allegedly made one of them “crawl on the floor toward me and perform oral sex on me, and he said, ‘This is my f—ing pet, I trained her. She’s going to teach you how to be with me.’”
This isn’t the first time Jones has spat verbal darts at Kelly. In an October 2017 interview with Rolling Stone, in which she described him becoming physically abusive after she confronted him over the alleged child abuse images: “He would start kicking me, telling me I was a stupid b—- [and] don’t ever get in his business.”
In the documentary, she says, “[He’s] very abusive, physically, mentally, verbally. I think he gets some sort of satisfaction within himself, knowing that he’s taking control over other people.”
Kelly not only denied the accusations with vehemence, he issued a veiled threat, saying he will “work diligently and forcibly to pursue his accusers and clear his name.”
BBC3 also interviewed Jerhonda Pace, an ex-lover of Kelly’s who says she was “slapped and I was choked and I was spit on” by him. He’d also dress her up to look like a schoolgirl and mandated she call him “daddy.”
These scurrilous accounts contaminate the legacy of one of the most successful R&B singers of all time, by far. Only a handful of artists — of any musical genre — have ever experienced the long-term success that Kelly has enjoyed. He has dropped six U.S. No. 1 albums, with seven more reaching the Top 5; his hits include “Bump n’ Grind,” “I Believe I Can Fly” and “Step in the Name of Love” — and this doesn’t even include the blizzard of hits he has written for others, such as the No. 1 single “You Are Not Alone” for Michael Jackson.
The odious sex scandal, however, has taken its toll in recent years. Kelly hasn’t had a single in the Billboard Top 20 since 2007.
