Like rodents fleeing from a taking-too-long-to-sink ship, most of R. Kelly’s team has bid the embattled singer adieu.
His spokesperson, Trevian Kutti, confirmed to Pitchfork that she no longer works with Kelly as of this week. In addition, there are reports that Kelly’s entertainment attorney, Linda Mensch, who defended Kelly during the 2017 allegations that the singer was running a “sex cult,” and his assistant, Diana Copeland, who worked with the singer on his “Trapped in the Closet” opera, are no longer on his team.
On Monday, as exclusively reported in an interview with The Root, a Dallas woman alleges that the 51-year-old R&B crooner gave her herpes and groomed her to be his sex pet, complete with dehumanizing requirements including being called “his bitch” in public, participating in group sex and having long periods of isolation.
“Queen” told The Root’s associate editor, Kirsten West Savali:
During the time that I was being groomed to join Kelly’s sex cult, I was recorded without permission; he also watched himself engaging in sexual acts with other women around me. I was kept in solitude for extensive periods of time, coerced into engaging in sexual acts that I did not want to engage in and treated very much like something less than human.
Then there’s the recent BBC3 documentary R Kelly: Sex, Girls and Videotapes,
in which former girlfriend Kitty Jones says that Kelly introduced her to a girl whom he had allegedly “trained” since she was 14.
“I saw that she was dressed like me, that she was saying the things I’d say and her mannerisms were like mine,” Jones said in the film. “That’s when it clicked in my head that he had been grooming me to become one of his pets. He calls them his pets.”
And on and on and on and on. Guess this was the straw that finally did it.