R. Kelly and Dramatic Gulf Between Fantasy and Realty

I don't know about y’all but I have been following R. Kelly’s trial through the terrific website The Root. It takes a strong stomach to keep up with the latest development in the self-styled Pied Piper of R&B because they are frequently stomach-churning. 

Every time you feel like things can’t possibly get any more repulsive or repugnant the disgraced pop star finds a new and horrifying low. To cite a particularly scatological example, one of the sex cult proprietor’s many forms of “punishment” for exceedingly minor transgressions involved making the poor women at his mercy literally eat shit. 

The contrast between these horrifying accounts of molestation, humiliation and torture by a monster empowered to be his worst, most destructive self by fame and money and power and the lurid romantic and sexual fantasies found on R. Kelly’s albums could not be bigger or more dramatic.

Kelly made hundreds of millions of dollars selling himself as every woman’s dream, a consummate romantic with the resources to make fantasies become realities. 

In that respect, Kelly’s entire catalog represents an elaborate and unconscionable act of grooming. 

Reading about Kelly’s crimes I keep asking myself how it was possible for Kelly to get away with it even after a tape of him urinating on an underage girl became the centerpiece of a case against the hit-maker for child pornography in 2008. 

How could anyone associate themselves with someone who had obviously committed such unspeakable sex crimes against children? Didn’t they realize the danger any teenager in his orbit would face if left alone with him for any amount of time? 

Then again the legal system inexplicably found Kelly not guilty despite seemingly incontrovertible evidence of his crimes and Kelly himself spent decades aggressively promoting a counter-narrative of himself as a sensitive artist, humanitarian and world-class lover. 

THIS was the narrative that parents and teenagers desperately wanted to believe when they got involved with the disgraced sex criminal because it portrayed Kelly as a star-maker with the power to change lives for the better, not someone who destroys and corrupts everything he touches. 

Kelly is not alone in promoting a public image not just different but antithetical to the ugly truth. Bill Cosby, for example, was revered for a good HALF CENTURY as the ultimate good guy, a beloved and adorable man-child and the conscience of black America. 

If Cosby weren’t such a stern moralist intent on telling generation upon generation of young black men to pull up their pants, cut it with the potty mouth routine and stop listening to gangsta rap  there's a good chance he could have traveled the Jimmy Savile route and gone to his grave unpunished for his half-century long crime spree. 

Then there’s Harvey Weinstein. He had a reputation as a vicious, amoral bully but he also cultivated an image as a proud liberal committed to making socially conscious movies that reflected his political convictions. 

Even James Toback attempted to hide behind his self-wrought mythology when he was accused of sexually harassing countless actresses through the years and defended himself by angrily asking whether a GREAT artist like himself would compromise his self-autobiographical art about self-destructive sex addicts who cannot control their dark compulsions by behaving like a self-destructive sex addict who cannot control his compulsions. 

The personas Kelly, Cosby, Weinstein and Toback created were deliberate fictions designed to hide the truth about their authentic criminal selves from the public,  the industry and the world at large. 

Maya Angelou famously said, “"When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time." That is invariably true. Each of people I’ve written about here showed the world who they were through their action, then tried to deceive them through their empty words. 

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