R Kelly Gets 30 Years & May He Suffer As Much In Prison As His Victims Did For Years…

By Joyce Davis

Growing up I remember R. Kelly as the bad boy musician with tunes like “I Don’t See Nothing Wrong With A Little Bump And Grind”. I loved his music. In my community he was a very big hit anywhere you went. I remember when he dated Aaliyah. It was hush, hush but everyone knew they were together. I did not think anything about how old she was compared to how old he was. It’s like the kid movies that cater to kids, so they have kids doing adult things. You accept it because it is what is there.

Now that I am older and I have thought about it, a twenty-seven-year-old man had no business with a fifteen-year-old girl. Sadly, Aaliyah was not the only one he abused and groomed to be his girlfriend at a young age. He went on trial after a pee-pee tape surfaced of him and a fourteen-year-old surfaced. He was acquitted of the charges in 2008. I know I was outraged. This guy showed a pattern that was not stopping. He was not going to stop now that he got away with it.

Then the world changed. #MeToo had women speaking up about what they went through. A documentary called “Surviving R. Kelly” came out. I cry just saying the name of the show because I can only imagine their trauma.

Prosecutors stepped up and started a case against him, He was arrested back in July of 2019. When they said he did not have a bail and was remanded to jail, I knew finally he was going to jail. In the black community we were pissed that no one cared about black and brown girls being repeatedly abused. Finally, someone stepped up to charge him and this time women were ready to talk about what they went through and who put them through it. I cried then. I felt the collective release of every one he victimized.

He still had to go through a trial where he was found guilty on all accounts. The prosecutor made sure to add Aaliyah in the case even though she is no longer with us. He was sentenced to thirty years in jail. He is fifty-five so that means he will die in jail with this sentence. If that is not enough for him to think about, he has more cases ahead that have not been tried.

I don’t feel bad for him. His lawyer claims that he was abused by family members and passed around to family friends so mitigating circumstances should have let him serve less time than life. As a survivor, who never abused anyone, I say no; that is not a defense. If anything, you should get more time. The prosecutor wanted 20 years and the defense wanted ten. The judge gave him thirty.