R. Kelly was sentenced Wednesday to 30 years in prison for running a decades-long program in which he used his inner circle of associates and associates to recruit young girls, boys and women to sexually abuse him.
One of those girls, according to the jury, was beloved R&B icon Aaliyah, who was introduced to the sexual predator by her uncle Barry Hankerson when she was just 12 years old. Hankerson was Kelly’s manager at the time.
In a Tuesday memo denying Kelly’s request for a new trial, Judge Ann Donnelly named Hankerson among the staff hired to attend to Kelly’s “professional and personal needs.”
No evidence was presented in court that Hankerson knew Kelly was abusing his niece, but he was identified in another manager’s testimony as the man who introduced Kelly to Aaliyah at her Chicago home.
Insider reached out to Hankerson through his music label, Blackground Records, but didn’t get an immediate response.
Aaliyah sang for Kelly and the R&B star took an interest in her. He wrote music for her – including her hit “Age Ain’t Nothing But a Number” – and they performed together.
A few years after meeting Aaliyah, Kelly bribed an Illinois officer to get her a fake ID so he could marry her in a hotel room when she was 15, witnesses said. The point of the marriage, said one of Kelly’s other victims, was that she could have an abortion without her parents’ consent.
Without naming Hankerson, Donnelly spoke sternly about the role Kelly’s employees played in enabling his abuse of Aaliyah and the other girls and women.
His runners, managers and others in his inner circle — notably Demetrius Smith — knew what Kelly was doing to Aaliyah and others and did nothing to stop it, she said. Smith testified that he once confronted Kelly because he felt he was “too playful” with the young girl and that he may have been “playing around” with her.
“Mr. Smith knew what you were doing, but when you thought she was pregnant and thought you would be caught for what you had done, he and your other caregivers helped bribe someone to get this child a fake ID, so they could get married because you wanted to cover up that you had sex with a young girl,” she said. “They wanted to protect you and your career and they helped you and the victim didn’t matter.”
This combination photo shows singer R. Kelly after the first day of jury selection in his child pornography trial May 9, 2008 at the Cook County Criminal Courthouse in Chicago, left, the late R&B singer and actress Aaliyah during a photo shoot in New York May 9 2001. AP Photo
A company of abuse
During Kelly’s six-week trial, jurors heard from Kelly’s victims, employees and others about how he controlled the young women and girls in his orbit.
Evidence presented at the trial showed that once Kelly gained control, he sexually and physically abused his victims, whom he subjected to strict rules governing how they dressed, how they spoke, where they went and who looked at them.
Some of the employees were forced to give out Kelly’s phone number to young people at venues such as McDonald’s or its concerts. Others were responsible for enforcing his strict rules when in his homes.
Evidence presented at the trial showed that once Kelly gained control, he sexually and physically abused his victims, whom he subjected to strict rules governing how they dressed, how they spoke, where they went and who looked at them.
If Kelly felt they broke any of his rules, the penalties were severe and humiliating, evidence showed.
“There are countless other examples of employees standing by or enabling your behavior. You heard yourself beating these victims. They knew you were holding them in a room or on a bus,” Donnelly told R. Kelly on Wednesday.
Donnelly questioned whether staff would have turned a blind eye to an “exception to every standard of human decency” just because he was famous.
“Did they agree with you, as we heard at the trial, that you can do whatever you want because you believed yourself to be a genius who ‘may do whatever I want because of what I give to this world?'” , she asked. “There is much, much more that could be said about people who have condoned this and tolerated this over the years, but those people do not stand before me for judgment today.”