Given what we know about Robert Kelly in 2018, it’s a wonder the man is still walking free. And yet, here we are.
The latest allegation, one of many within the last year, comes from Kelly’s ex-girlfriend Kitti Jones in an interview she gave for the BBC3 documentary R Kelly: Sex, Girls and Videotapes.
As The Guardian reports, the 34-year-old Jones told interviewers that she had been groomed by the R&B singer to perform sex acts and accept his controlling, manipulative behavior. Jones claimed that Kelly forced her to have sex with him and others at least 10 times in what she described as a “sex dungeon.”
Jones said:
I was introduced to one of the girls, that he told me he “trained” since she was 14, those were his words. I saw that she was dressed like me, that she was saying the things I’d say and her mannerisms were like mine. 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.
The story is consistent with what Jones had previously told Rolling Stone in October of last year. In fact, Jones seemed to describe a scene in the BBC documentary similar to the one she mentions in the Rolling Stone interview, where she said Kelly made one of his “pets” crawl on the floor toward Jones and perform oral sex on her.
“[Kelly] said, ‘This is my fucking pet, I trained her. She’s going to teach you how to be with me,’” Jones said.
What’s new from Jones is the allegation that Kelly, who has frequently referred to himself as “the Pied Piper of R&B,” had groomed one of his sex partners since she was a child. It’s still unclear how old the girl was at the time of Jones’ encounter with her. Jones dated Kelly between 2011 and 2013.
While the public has repeatedly clamored for investigations into R. Kelly’s behavior—most recently, his alleged sex cult in Georgia—there is no open criminal investigation against him.
R. Kelly did not comment for the BBC or Guardian piece but has consistently denied any wrongdoing.