It has been nearly 15 years
since music journalist Jim DeRogatis caught the story that has since defined
his career, one that he wishes didn't exist: R. Kelly's sexual predation on
teenage girls.
DeRogatis, at that time the
pop-music critic at the Chicago Sun-Times,was anonymously delivered the first of two videos he
would receive depicting the pop star engaging in sexual acts with underage
girls. Now the host of the syndicated public radio show Sound Opinions and a professor at Columbia College, DeRogatis, along
with his former Sun-Times colleague Abdon Pallasch, didn't just break the story,
they did the only significant reporting on the accusations against Kelly,
interviewing hundreds of people over the years, including dozens of young women
whose lives DeRogatis says were ruined by the singer.
This past summer,
leading up to Kelly's headlining performance at the Pitchfork Music Festival,
DeRogatis posted a series of discussions about Kelly's career, the charges made
against him, and sexual assault.
Refresh our memories. How did
this start for you?
Being a beat
reporter, music critic at a Chicago daily, the Sun-Times, R. Kelly was a huge story for me, this guy
who rose from not graduating from Kenwood Academy, singing at backyard
barbecues and on the El, to suddenly selling millions of records. I interviewed
him a number of times. Then TP2.com came out. I'd written a review that
said the jarring thing about Kelly is that one moment he wants to be riding you
and then next minute he's on his knees, crying and praying to his dead mother
in Heaven for forgiveness for his unnamed sins. It's a little weird at times.
It's just an observation.
The next day at
the Sun-Times, we got this anonymous
fax -- we didn't know where it came from. It said: R. Kelly's been under
investigation for two years by the sex-crimes unit of the Chicago police. And I
threw it on the corner of my desk. I thought, "player-hater." Now, from
the beginning, there were rumors that Kelly likes them young. And there'd been
this Aaliyah thing -- Vibe printed, without much commentary and
no reporting, the marriage certificate. Kelly or someone had falsified her age
as 18. There was that. So all this is floating in the air. This fax arrives and
I think, "Oh, this is somebody playing with this." But there was
something that nagged at me as a reporter. There were specific names, specific
dates, and those great, long Polish cop names. And you're not going to make thatcrap up. So I went to the city desk and I asked,
"What do we do with this?" They said, Abdon Pallasch is the courts
reporter, why don't you two look into it and see if there's anything there? And
it turns out there had been lawsuits that had been filed that had never been
reported.
When you cover the courts in Chicago or any city, you go
twice a day and you go through the bin of cases that have been filed and every
once in a while Michael Jordan's been sued or someone went bankrupt and it's
this sexy story and you pull it out. These suits had been filed at 4 p.m. on
Christmas Eve. Ain't no reporter working at 4 p.m. on Christmas Eve, and they
flew under the radar. So we had these lawsuits that were explosive and we
didn't understand why nobody had reported them.
