There is so much beauty in the world that it becomes easy to turn away from the ugliness, to treat it as an aberration.
That is how we felt about R. Kelly, the R&B singer and producer. It seems to be the way a lot of people felt.
Kelly was charged with 10 counts of aggravated criminal sexual assault last Friday, alleging that he repeatedly abused four women, three of whom were minors. If he is convicted, he could face up to 70 years in prison. It was news, but it was not surprising.
Some of the allegations date back to 1998. Others are even older. In 2002, Kelly was indicted on 21 counts of making child pornography. Six years later, after costly legal wrangling, a jury quickly found him not guilty.
During all the time that he was dogged by allegations of the kind that finally landed him in a Chicago jail last week, he was selling millions of albums and reaping hundreds of millions of dollars from the sale of music he produced and recorded – a quarter of a billion dollars, by one informed estimate.
Speaking after Kelly’s latest court appearance, one of his attorneys said he “is a rock star. He doesn’t have to have non-consensual sex.”
This is nonsense, although it edges toward truth.
There was really just one question left: If Kelly is guilty, as he seems to be, how was he able to escape consequences for so long?
We might as well ask what turns people into monsters. What makes them think they can buy rape? Part of the answer is money. At least part of the answer is almost always money – or power
Years ago, the humorist John Hodgman asked people, if they could have a superpower, and had to choose between flight and invisibility, which would it be? He was surprised, he said, by how quickly people chose, “as though they had been thinking about it for a long time.” They knew just which superpower they wanted and what they would do with it.
They wanted to fly to a bar, or to Atlantic City. They imagined having flight-groupies who would give them sex. Invisible people wanted to eavesdrop, look at people naked in showers or shoplift from high-end department stores. “So you would become a thief pretty quickly?” Hodgman asked one woman. “Immediately!” she said. “Until I had all the sweaters I wanted, and then I would have to think of other things to do.”
“Here’s one thing pretty much no one says,” Hodgman observed: “‘I would use my power to fight crime.’ No one seems to care about crime.”
That seems to be even truer when some people have unlimited power.
If you investigate accounts of torture, one of the things you discover is how limited the human imagination can become. Torturers with absolute dominion revert to the same elemental methods – suffocation, burning, drowning: air, fire, water. Power, like wealth, can beggar us, imaginatively, morally and absolutely.
Jim DeRogatis, a Chicago music journalist, has covered R. Kelly’s aberrations for two decades, publishing his first story about the star’s depravity in The Chicago Sun-Times in 2000. He, along with the victims who are speaking out and their other advocates, is a bright spot in this story – a hero.
That 2008 acquittal made DeRogatis work harder. He cared about crime. He never gave up on the girls.
“You’re not a journalist or a human being if you get those calls and do not do your job,” he told Variety.
Talking to NPR’s Morning Edition last weekend, DeRogatis said he didn’t think there had ever been another predator on Kelly’s level in the history of popular music. “I know the names of 48 women whose lives have been seriously hurt or ruined by the biggest-selling R&B star of his generation,” he said, “in view of the world’s spotlight, with no recriminations.”
Perhaps not anymore. In all the darkness, here is a ray of hope: What if wealth and power can no longer shield men from the consequences of their wickedness?
Just imagine.
