It wasn’t too long ago where fans and other musicians were calling Robert Kelly the “King of R&B”. Now, after Lifetime released a miniseries “Surviving R. Kelly“, many are having a change of heart about the 52-year old R&B singer.
It all began in 2002, when Kelly was about to perform at the Winter Olympics, a video revealed Kelly urinating and having sex with an underage girl. He was indicted in Chicago on 21 counts of child pornography in June 2002.
Then Miami Police had an arrest warrant for Kelly’s Davenport home and found 12 images of an alleged underage girl on camera and involved in sexual activities. Reports claim it was the same girl in Chicago. He was arrested again in January 2003 for those charges but they were dropped for the lack of probable cause to search his Davenport home.
He was then brought to trial for the charges in Chicago on May 20 2008 and after less than 24 hours of deliberation, Kelly was found not guilty of all counts the next month.
After that, it was quiet until 2017 where three sets of parent accused Kelly of holding their daughters in a “abusive cult“. He addressed the cult allegations by releasing a 19-minute long song called “I Admit” on SoundCloud in July 2018. In the song, he sings “only God can mute me” which was towards a social media campaign called #MuteRKelly. He denied all allegations in the songs as well.
Now, a Lifetime series has brought back the horrendous side of the singer we were just calling ‘the king of R&B’ back into focus.
Spotify removed R. Kelly from their playlist and some radio stations are divided over the ban. Like George Cook, the Director of Operations of an R&B radio station in Dallas, who removed his music but wasn’t 100% on doing it at first.
“We didn’t want to be in a position where anyone was defending him. We all just came to the agreement that we’re no longer going to support the music. It was not an easy decision, but I think it was the right one.”
Another Texas radio station, Smooth R&B 105.7, removed his music as well. Listen to their reason why on the next page.