By Josh Levin
Posted Wednesday, May 21, 2008
As R. Kelly’s child pornography trial is about to start, the judge’s media liaison gathers all of the reporters together to announce that we’ll be watching a sex tape in open court. He then delivers stern advice about doodling. “I am here to warn you,” says Terry Sullivan, “that anyone who draws a depiction or a simulation can be committing the act of child pornography. … You don’t want to be doing that.” Since I have the artistic skills of someone with no hands, this isn’t much of a setback. The courtroom sketch artists, naturally, are more concerned. One of them asks if she can avoid prosecution by doing something “free form.” I have no idea what she’s contemplating, but I hope she remembered to pack a urine-colored pencil.
A little bit after 1 p.m., the blinds are drawn and the lights go down. For the jury, there’s a giant screen on wheels in front of the jury box. For the press, there’s a Sony flat screen, lashed to an A/V cart with thick orange straps as if it’s a flight risk. The VHS tape starts to roll, and the first voice I hear belongs to Hall of Fame Baltimore Orioles pitcher Jim Palmer, the one-time spokesman for the Money Store. As Palmer explains how you can easily lower your monthly payments, a guy with a shaved head who looks a lot like R. Kelly hands a young woman a folded-up stack of cash. “Thank you,” she says softly. He pulls down his pants. Fellatio ensues. A few seconds later, a sitcom laugh track kicks up. He goes off-camera and turns off the television, perhaps fearing that canned laughter isn’t an appropriate backing track for a taped sexual performance.
The prosecution’s case hinges on Kelly’s auteurship. In her opening statement, prosecutor Shauna Boliker argues that he “choreographed, produced, and starred in” the nearly 27-minute video. Kelly denies the video is his work. Whoever the videographer may be, his style is utilitarian. The image is bright and clear, and the director-star occasionally steps out of the picture to make sure the shot is framed properly, or to zoom in on an essential detail—say, the girl urinating on a tile floor. The choreography is also straightforward. The girl gyrates her hips from side to side like an exotic dancer; he moans lasciviously and orders her to move faster. The filmmaker’s creativity comes through more clearly in the set design. The action takes place in what the prosecution says is the basement of Kelly’s former home, a room that looks a lot like a log cabin—there is a handful of tall, green potted plants, and the walls appear to be fashioned from gigantic felled trees. No longer will I have to wonder what an Abe Lincoln sex tape might have looked like.
Kelly’s lawyers tried, exhaustively but futilely, to prevent the jury from seeing the video. This is understandable—when you’re defending an accused child pornographer, it’s best not to have the jury hear a man who looks just like your client refer to himself, on tape, as “daddy” as he begins to have intercourse with the alleged victim. (The girl’s answer when he asks her to initiate sex: “Yes, Daddy.”) There’s also the matter of his prolonged urination on the girl’s face and breasts, which stops and starts, and stops and starts, for what seems like minutes on end. It’s excruciating to watch.
Before the tape started rolling, I thought that a few people might have to leave the courtroom. The vibe in the room, though, is more uncomfortable than appalled, like we’ve all been dragooned into watching Porky’s Revenge at grandma’s house. Aside from one guy who occasionally breaks into a nervous smile, the jury is stone-faced and intent on the big screen. The two obvious Kelly fans in the room—a pair of young girls who’ve scored visitors’ passes—watch with their hands in their pockets and slightly downturned mouths. Kelly, wearing a dark pinstripe suit and a blue tie with diagonal orange stripes, his hair immaculately braided, tilts his head every so often, putting his chin on his hand to peer at the video from a different angle.
If the defense is to be believed, Kelly is looking at someone other than himself. In the defense’s opening statement, Sam Adam Jr. proclaims, “Robert Kelly is not on that tape.” I predict that in the decades to come, law schools will teach this as the “Shaggy defense.” You allege that I was caught on camera, butt naked, banging on the log cabin floor? It wasn’t me.
Considering that the mystery VHS man and R. Kelly look exactly alike, this is not an easy argument to make. But if anyone on the defense team can make the Shaggy defense work, it’s the stout, bombastic Adam Jr. Compared with Kelly’s other lawyers—including Adam’s Uncle Fester-looking father, Sam Adam Sr., and lead attorney Edward Genson, who shambles about the courtroom with a cane on account of a neuromuscular disease—Adam Jr. has the benefit of youthful exuberance. Adam Jr. displays a photo of a shirtless Kelly, pointing to a “significant mole” on his back, a mole, he claims, that mystery VHS man does not have. Either that’s not R. Kelly on the tape, he shouts, or Kelly is capable of spontaneously producing moles, “like David Copperfield!” (The mole in the photo, which the defense sometimes calls a birthmark, looks a bit like it was applied with black Magic Marker. Is that David Copperfield’s secret?) Unfortunately, the judge does not permit Adam Jr. to show a still from the video during opening statements, and the video screen is too far away for me to do a rigorous mole analysis.
Proving that R. Kelly is mystery VHS man will be the prosecution’s easiest task. It’ll be harder to prove the identity of mystery VHS girl. The alleged victim, you see, says it’s not her on the tape, either, and she won’t testify against Kelly. “If she’s not here for you to see her, for you to hear her … there’s one reason for that,” Adam Jr. says. “It’s not her on that tape.”
After the first day, it’s hard to avoid thinking that the prosecution is building a roundabout case. Rather than have the alleged victim say she’s a victim, the state will have the girl’s relatives identify her. And rather than charge Kelly with statutory rape or sexual abuse, they’re trying him as a child pornographer. The facts of this particular case don’t come close to speaking to the nature and magnitude of Kelly’s alleged crimes.
In the last decade, there have been at least 11 separate accusations that Kelly had sex with someone underage. He has paid settlements to at least four girls who accused him of sexual misconduct. He married the now-deceased R&B ingénue Aaliyah Haughton when she was 15; her parents had the marriage annulled immediately. (For all the sordid details, settle in with Bill Wyman’s indispensable R. Kelly SexFacts.)
In hearings closed to the press, the prosecution petitioned to present evidence of all these alleged misdeeds. On the basis of today’s proceedings, Judge Vincent Gaughan seems to have ruled that none of them is fair game. The first clue comes when Dan Everett, the now-retired Chicago police detective who first received the tape from a reporter at the Chicago Sun-Times, says that he recognized mystery VHS girl from a previous investigation. Gaughan tells the jury to leave the room, then announces that he might declare a mistrial. Investigation, it seems, is the courtroom’s secret word, and not in a fun, balloons-falling-from-the-ceiling sort of way.
The judge, who served as an officer at Vietnam, isn’t so good at hiding disdain for his inferiors. He’s furious at “this retired detective” because everyone had agreed that Everett would say he knew the girl from a previous “interview” rather than an “investigation.” This word game was designed to get around having to reveal to the jury that the Chicago police had been investigating Kelly’s relationship with the girl for 14 months before the appearance of a video tape. “It’s an egregious mistake,” Gaughan says, rocking back in his chair, but he decides not to declare a mistrial. It’s been six years since this tape came to light, and after a litany of delays—Kelly’s burst appendix, the prosecutor’s pregnancy, Gaughan’s own tumble from a ladder—the judge isn’t going to let a marble-mouthed cop keep this trial from finally getting under way.
Though it’s not allowed inside the courtroom, evidence regarding Kelly’s mysterious power over young women is in abundance outside. Kelly doesn’t have a Michael Jackson-caliber rainbow coalition of superfan weirdos. Rather, the R&B lothario’s courthouse supporters are from a more uniform demographic: teenage African-American girls. As he steps into the fifth-floor hallway for a lunch break, four female fans scream in ecstasy and pull out camera phones—contraband inside the courthouse—and unashamedly snap away. When admonished by a bailiff for making so much noise, one member of the group says, incredulous, “How are we supposed to act when R. Kelly come?” Once we’re all outside, the Kelly-loving gaggle approaches me. They want to know how another fan scored entry backstage, aka the courtroom. “I’m gonna knock that girl out and take her pass,” one of them says.
A day after converting the courtroom into the world’s least comfortable porno theater, it’s now time for the state to prove that we watched R. Kelly having sex in his faux log cabin—not an R. Kelly impersonator in some other guy’s faux log cabin. To that end, the prosecution calls Simha “Punky” Jamison, a 24-year-old hair stylist who was best friends with the alleged victim throughout junior high and high school. She’s a strong witness, composed if occasionally snarky. When prosecutor Shauna Boliker asks whether she and the victim saw each other every day, Jamison laughs to herself before saying yes, like it’s inconceivable that it could’ve been any other way.
Jamison says she met Kelly when she was about 13, through the alleged victim’s family. After church one Sunday, they all drove to Hoops, the upscale gym where Kelly played basketball. From that day on, Jamison and her friend would visit with Kelly on the court, at his recording studio, and in his log-themed residence more than 100 times. (While we’re on the subject, some new log cabin facts from today’s testimony: Along with the logs, the lower level of Kelly’s former residence includes a short lap pool and a basketball court with a mural depicting the singer shooting hoops with the Tasmanian Devil. From the outside, the red-brick residence—which you can take a gander at on Google Street View—looks less like a place where someone might live than some sort of small-time paper mill. His next-door neighbor was an Enterprise Rent-a-Car.)
Jamison says she heard rumors of an R. Kelly sex tape during her junior year of high school. She watched a bootleg copy at a friend’s house in early 2002 and ran home crying after seeing the girl on the screen—”I thought she looked just like my best friend.” The giveaways: her face and her mullet haircut. The girls had come to a mutual decision to look like Billy Ray Cyrus, and Jamison recognized the “short at the top, long in the back” style. She also contends that the financial transaction at the beginning of the video isn’t an indication that the girl on the video is a prostitute—Kelly frequently handed her friend various amounts of cash for shopping. (The prosecution also implies, but never says directly, that Kelly bought the girl a PT Cruiser.)
On cross-examination, Adam Jr. repeatedly confirms that Jamison relied exclusively on her best friend’s face and hair to identify the girl and time-stamp the video. “You can’t tell by looking at a person’s vagina how old they are, can you?” he asks, then takes a stab at answering his own question: “I don’t think you can.” Once it’s well-established that Jamison didn’t pay much attention to the alleged victim’s crotch and torso, Adam Jr. asks whether Jamison has seen a “Waymon Brothers” movie called Little Man. “They took the head of Marlon Waymons and put it on a midget, and it looked real, didn’t it?” Adam Jr. exclaims, emphasizing the last two words for maximum “gotcha” effect. Jamison looks at him like he’s a lunatic or, at least, an astoundingly bad film critic. “Not reeeally,” she says, her voice lilting in disbelief as the courtroom breaks up. Congratulations to the Waymon Brothers: This is the first time Little Man has generated laughter.
Amazingly, Adam Jr. is not kidding about any of this. Just as special effects turned Marlon Wayans (I know your last name, my friend!) into a little person, he suggests, so might the sex tape we saw on Tuesday be some sort of digital collage of faces and bodies. He asks Jamison whether she can tell if the video has been tampered with. Judge Gaughan doesn’t allow the question: “Just because she’s seen the Waymons’ movies doesn’t make her an expert on morphing.”
Kelly’s defense team can be forgiven for its ignorance of Little Man—rare is the man who will admit to having seen it. Still, you’d think some junior associate might have mentioned to his bosses that it’s (allegedly) a comedy, and derives its (nonexistent) laughs from the fact that the film’s Mini-Wayans is ridiculously unchildlike. Perhaps Adam Jr. would have done better with an analogy to a movie where the CGI trickery wasn’t played for laughs, something like, “They took off John Travolta’s face and put it on Nicolas Cage’s body, and it looked real, didn’t it?” Or maybe: “They took a sexy cartoon lady and had her kiss Bob Hoskins, and it looked real, didn’t it?” One must also consider that, despite being terrible, Little Man cost millions of dollars. The sex tape at issue here appears to have cost more like $1.50, a budget that would make it hard to employ Industrial Light & Magic.
Another problem with the Little Man theory: motive. I suppose it’s theoretically possible that someone might blackmail a rich, famous entertainer like R. Kelly by superimposing his face onto a sex-having, urine-producing body. But why would anyone want to pull a Little Man on the alleged victim? She’s not rich, and she’s not famous; the defense hasn’t explained what other possible incentive there could be to tamper with her image.
Having exhausted the Little Man line of inquiry, the defense tries to recruit Jamison to its side on the matter of the missing mole. The hair stylist, however, seems to agree with my Magic Marker theory. When the defense asks her to look at a photo of Kelly’s back, she asks whether the mole/birthmark is real or perhaps some kind of stray mark on the print. Her final conclusion: It could be “a cancerous mole, maybe.” Kelly tilts back his head and laughs heartily, by far the most emotion he’s shown all week.
The only other time Kelly cracks a smile is when he offers a demure wave to the two teenage female worshippers who are in the courtroom again, having thoroughly mastered the visitors’ pass system. (Discussion topic: Is it crazier for teenage girls to worship R. Kelly or for R. Kelly to wave at teenage girls in open court?) Based on Jamison’s testimony, these girls seem to have a familiar relationship with Kelly. Jamison says that she and her best friend would sit at the record studio and “do nothing”—just sit, talk, and watch R. Kelly from a slight remove. Tabling the more nefarious bits for now, it seems that Kelly, at the very least, enjoys the simple pleasure of having an underage girl entourage.
Not every prosecution witness is as strong as Jamison. Bennie Lee Edwards Sr., the uncle of the alleged victim, testifies that he recognized his niece on the video, and that she looked about 14. This testimony is less compelling once you hear Edwards take 10 long seconds to remember his own age, then botch his own son’s date of birth. He also gets in a long dispute with the defense over whether police once found crack rocks under his hat. He contends that the crack was in his truck.
Wednesday’s final witness is Bennie Edwards’ ex-wife, Delores Gibson. A Chicago police officer and the alleged victim’s aunt, Gibson admits that she first saw the sex tape, and identified her niece as the victim, way back in December 2001. The cops didn’t get a copy until the Sun-Times turned it over in February 2002, and Adam Jr. presses Gibson on why she didn’t follow her police training and turn over the tape immediately. “You’re not telling the ladies and gentlemen of the jury that you saw your niece on that tape, are you?” he asks with all the incredulity he can muster. Instead, she told the alleged victim’s mother to go to an attorney. Going to a lawyer, Adam Jr. contends, is a sign that for Gibson and certain other family members, this was always about money. This sounds like a preview of the defense’s strategy moving forward.
According to the defense, the mastermind of this plot was Gibson’s sister-in-law Stephanie Edwards, aka R&B singer Sparkle. Sparkle was once a protégé of Kelly’s—he produced one of her albums, and they did a duet together in 1998 called “Be Careful.” When Kelly declined to continue working with her, Adam Jr. shouts, Sparkle had an ax to grind. The sex tape was Sparkle’s tool to extort her former mentor, to solicit a hefty donation from the R. Kelly Foundation for Girls Who Have Been Abused by R. Kelly. The jury doesn’t know, however, that Kelly has a history of paying off his underage accusers, and the defense is hardly going to be the one to tell them about it. Instead, Adam Jr. sticks to attacking Sparkle’s credibility even before she takes the stand. Gibson denies the defense’s contention that she didn’t turn over the tape because she “knew it was a phony.” Here, the Sparkle and the Little Man theories converge: Maybe, just maybe, Sparkle knows the Waymon Brothers.
If there’s a life lesson to be taken from the R. Kelly trial, it’s that when you’re trying to help your niece launch a music career, perhaps it’s best to widen the search for mentors beyond the man who sings “It Seems Like You’re Ready” and “I Like the Crotch on You.” On the stand this afternoon, Stephanie Edwards (aka R&B singer Sparkle) says that she introduced the alleged victim, a budding rapper and singer, to Kelly when the three of them met up in the log cabin to watch the Chicago Bulls in the NBA Finals. Depending on whether that was the Bulls’ fifth or sixth championship, the alleged victim would’ve been either 12 or 13. A basketball player herself, the girl was jolly, personable, and a little tomboyish—Kelly, Edwards says, “liked her spirit.” (This suggests a possible song title for the clean version of R. Kelly’s greatest hits: “I Like the Spirit on You.”)
Stephanie Edwards’ two hours of testimony are a reminder that the clichés of the televised courtroom drama aren’t entirely fanciful. As she remembers her niece’s personality, Edwards—her hair up in a tight bob, gold hoop earrings dangling down to the top of her long neck, a dash of Sparkle-y glitter applied neatly above her left cheek—dabs at her eyes, and one of the sheriff’s deputies in the room brings her tissues. Defense attorney Edward Genson, too, performs like a man in search of a camera. Genson, who looks like an unkempt sheepdog but questions witnesses like a flesh-hungry pit bull, presses her to admit that she was intimately involved with the production and distribution of the sex tape, including scheduling a screening for the girls’ parents. Sparkle says that never happened. “You have no idea why they’ll testify to that?” Genson asks, immediately withdrawing the question as the prosecution objects furiously.
For the first half-hour or so of cross-examination, Genson gathers details to support the defense’s Little Man theory. He asks whether she knows how many of the “hours and hours” of footage typically shot for a music video are never used (she has no idea), how many different videos Kelly has made over the years (a lot), and how many videos the alleged victim’s much smaller-time musical group starred in during its career (she says two or three).
Genson next establishes Sparkle’s motive: a bitter musical divorce. After her self-titled debut (released in 1998 and produced, written, and arranged by Kelly) was certified platinum, Edwards expressed a desire to work with other producers. This didn’t sit well with Kelly, she acknowledges, and the two of them parted ways contractually in 2000. Over Genson’s protestations, Edwards insists that she and Kelly still got along personally at this point—”he was my homeboy”—though she also admits that Kelly withheld royalty payments and claims that he still hasn’t paid for her decade-old album. A short while later, Sparkle started talking with record exec Barry Hankerson, Kelly’s one-time manager and now bitter enemy. (Genson asserts that Hankerson and Kelly are foes, though he omits the fact that Kelly’s child-bride, Aaliyah, was Hankerson’s niece; upon leaving the singer’s employ, Hankerson wrote a letter to Kelly’s record label saying that he “needed psychiatric help for his compulsion to pursue underage girls.”) Genson, with his voice raised to a near-shout, tries repeatedly and futilely to get Edwards to admit that she got calls on her cell phone from Hankerson, and that they talked about their common enemy. “Was part of the deal doing something bad to Robert?” a frothing Genson asks. When Sparkle says “of course not,” he repeats her words back sarcastically.
Genson leaves it to us to put all of this together. Let’s give it a try: Frustrated with her declining musical career (and perhaps resentful of Kelly’s astoundingly successful one), Sparkle hatched a scheme to extort her rich ex-mentor and to turn the words of her hit song “Be Careful” into reality. (“You better be careful what you do to me,” she sang, ” ‘cause somebody might do it to you.”) While Kelly was out making beats one night, she enlisted a pair of underemployed porn actors to bust into the singer’s log cabin and film themselves having sex, peeing, etc. Meanwhile, Sparkle and Hankerson harvested outtakes from Kelly’s copious back catalog of music videos, then took advantage of the thriving black market in Little Man-quality digital-effects wizardry to Frankenstein together Kelly’s face and the urinator’s body. (Sparkle’s motive for putting her niece in the video is less clear. For the sake of argument, let’s assume that she was mad at her for, say, borrowing her glitter without permission.) After Kelly refused to pay to keep the video under wraps, Sparkle sent the video to the Chicago Sun-Times, willing to make her niece collateral damage to disgrace the man who’d done her wrong.
The defense, of course, doesn’t have the burden of proving that all of this happened, and Genson does create a few slivers of doubt about Edwards’ story. Sparkle says that she first learned of the tape in December 2001 via a phone call from a lawyer named “Buddy something.” Her choice to omit the man’s last name—it’s Meyers, by the way—comes off a bit stagy, like she’s trying too hard to act like she’d never heard of or spoken to the guy. A couple of lingering questions: How did Meyers get the tape, and why would Meyers first contact the alleged victim’s aunt—a woman who happened to have a failed working relationship with Kelly—rather than the girl’s parents?
Near the end of her hours of testimony, Edwards cocks her head to the side with a quick snap, finally unable to hide her annoyance with Genson’s unrelenting inquisition. The defense attorney, perhaps noting the change in the witness’s mood, shifts into theatrical overdrive. Genson tries to get a rise out of Edwards by shouting that it is not Kelly on the sex tape. The conversation devolves into a testy exchange over whether the girl on the tape is or is not a prostitute and whether or not we’re all here today because Edwards is after Kelly’s money. “Sweetie, I am not trying to get any money with this,” says Edwards. Rarely has a term of endearment dripped with so much disdain. (“I am not your sweetie,” Genson states for the record.)
With the witness and lawyer playing the dozens, Judge Gaughan steps in to break things up before they get out of hand. Genson, however, won’t stop talking, and now it’s Gaughan who is ready to rumble—”Mr. Genson, you’re not listening!”—a military man clearly irked with having lost control of his troops.
From the beginning, Gaughan has been determined not to let this trial turn into a circus, going so far as to speak with court officials involved in Michael Jackson’s trial in the hopes of avoiding a similar zoo in Cook County. The lesson he seems to have drawn is that a judge must carry a big gavel to maintain order in such a high-profile case. The day’s proceedings had started with a short trial, conducted before the press, of a Chicagoan who had dared run afoul of Gaughan’s regime. Debra Triplett, a scraggly-looking 48-year-old woman, entered the courtroom with hands cuffed behind her back and wearing a baggy white T-shirt big enough to suggest it might also serve as her residence. Triplett had found herself outside the elevator that was transporting the jury to the courtroom. Seeing the jury disembark, she had been unable to resist the urge to shout, “Free R. Kelly!” Arguing that she had potentially tainted the jurors, Gaughan held her for contempt, set bail at $50,000, and scheduled a hearing on June 25. A few minutes later, Gaughan called in the jury and asked whether they’d heard anyone shouting. They had not.
The prosecution won’t call any more witness this week, so that’s all for me. Gaughan shouldn’t rest easy, though, as his resolve will surely be tested when Kelly’s attorneys unleash the long awaited I’m Gonna Git You Sucka defense. So long for now, Chicago.
