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R. Kelly allegations raise the question: Do #BlackGirlsLivesMatter too?

By Clarence Page, Tribune Content Agency on

After viewing "Surviving R. Kelly," Lifetime's riveting six-part documentary on the R&B star's decades of child and sexual abuse allegations, one question rings out to me above all others: Do black girls' lives matter?

Or as film star Jada Pinkett Smith said with alarm Sunday in a video tweet following reports that streams on Spotify of his 2002 single "Ignition" surged by 16 percent after the documentary's first night: "I really don't want to believe that it's because black girls don't matter enough. Or is that the reason?"

Good question. But in more hopeful news, there also was a 20 percent surge in calls to the sex abuse hotline operated by the Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network after the docuseries, which scored 1.9 million viewers in the Nielsen Media Research ratings, the network's best performance in more than two years.

Allegations of sexual misconduct have dogged Robert Sylvester Kelly, the 52-year-old Chicagoan's full name, for almost all of his more-than-30-year career as one of the biggest-selling stars in recorded music.

But for the first time, this documentary lets us hear some of these now-grown-up women tell their own stories. The result is a shocking parade of horribles that, despite blanket denials by Kelly and his legal teams, still raise questions as to how many strings he and his support network had to pull to keep him out of prison.

African-Americans made R. Kelly soar. They always had the power to bring him down.

 

In 1994, there was his marriage at age 27 to Aaliyah, a rising music star who was only 15, although as the documentary shows, she was listed as 18 on the marriage certificate. Months later the marriage was annulled and she died in a plane crash in 2001.

By then new allegations had emerged in lawsuits. In 1996 and 2001, lawsuits accused him of having sex with two underage girls, aged 15 and 17. Both settled out of court.

In 2002, a videotape surfaced that appears to show Kelly having sex with and urinating on a much younger-looking girl than the two who sued him. He was indicted by a Chicago grand jury on 21 counts of child pornography.

But in a trial that dragged on like the one at the center of Charles Dickens' "Bleak House," Kelly was found not guilty in 2008 on all counts after the girl in the video refused to testify.

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(c) 2019 CLARENCE PAGE DISTRIBUTED BY TRIBUNE MEDIA SERVICES, INC.

 

 

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