In
yet another explosive and revealing chat, America's R&B king,
R.Kelly has given an insight oh how he grew up without his father and
faced sexual abuse multiple times from family friends.
American recording artist, songwriter and former professional
basketball player, Robert Sylvester Kelly, known professionally as R.
Kelly, has opened up in a revealing interview with GQ magazine. The 49-year old who just released an album, "The Buffet," talked about being sexually abused as a child by both a man and woman.
The Chicago-born singer faced many challenges as he grew up without
a father who was gone before Kelly was born, and his mother wouldn't
talk about him. Kelly had a deep, close relationship with his mother,
but he says even she never knew everything that was going on in her
young son's turbulent life.
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. In the book, he describes a number of premature sexual
experiences, including an approach by a trusted family friend, a man,
who he says tried to persuade Kelly to masturbate him for money, which
he rebuffed.
On being sexually abused, he said it started with a man;
It was a crazy weird experience,“But not a full-blown experience,
because it didn't go down. Contact sexual - no. A visual -absolutely. A
visual from him showing me his penis and all that stuff. It was oral sex
the first time, though it soon became intercourse.
On how his sexual intercourse abuse started when he fell asleep and was awoken to find a woman playing with him:
I tried to push her away, but she wouldn't stop until she was
finished. When she was, she said, 'You better not say shit to no one or
else you gonna get a terrible whupping.' I remember it feeling weird. I
remember feeling ashamed. 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.
And did that change over time?
Over time, yeah. I remember actually, after a couple of years,
looking forward to it sometimes. You know, acting like I didn't, but
did.
How often would the abuse happen?
Oh wow. It became a regular thing. Every other day, every other week.
How many years did it go on for?
As far as I can remember, about [age] 7 or 8 to maybe 14, 15. Something like that.
Did anything in particular make it stop?
When I started having a girlfriend, I felt really bad about it.
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.
On forgiving them
I, well, definitely forgive them. 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.
