Following reports from this summer that R. Kelly is holding women against their will in a “sex cult,” several women (like this one, this one, and this one) who have been involved with Kelly have come forward and shared their stories about the sickening and bizarre conditions they were subjected to. Now, Kitti Jones, a former radio DJ and Kelly’s ex-girlfriend, has shared her story in an extensive Rolling Stone feature, in which she discusses everything from the night she met the singer to the last time they saw each other in person.
Jones met Kelly at a concert afterparty in Dallas in June 2011, when she was instantly charmed by the singer. Things quickly took a strange turn, though, when she texted him after their initial meeting and he responded by demanding she only refer to him as “daddy.” After the two had been talking regularly, via phone and text, over the next couple months, Kelly invited Jones to meet him in Denver. When Kelly arrived at the hotel room Jones was in, she says he just brushed past her.
“I’m thinking we’re going to hug or peck each other,” she said. “But he plopped down on the couch and pulled out his penis and started pleasuring himself.” She dismissed the incident as a sexual quirk, and after having oral sex that weekend, Jones said Kelly started telling her things like, “I gotta teach you how to be with me,” and, “I gotta train you.”
In November 2011, she quit her job and moved in with Kelly in Chicago, when he told her about his relationship with women:
“He said, ‘I have friends and I have girls I’ve raised.’ I didn’t know what he meant by ‘raised’ at the time. He said, ‘I eventually want you to meet them, but I want to make sure you’re mentally ready for that.'”
Jones said that “almost instantly upon moving to Chicago,” Kelly began controlling every aspect of her life, and said that less than a month after the move, the first instance of physical abuse occurred when she confronted about the video that was at the center of his child pornography trial.
“He said, ‘B*tch, don’t you ever f*cking accuse me of something like that,'” Jones says. “He never had spoken to me like that before.” When she met him at the airport after a trip to Dallas, she says Kelly slapped and kicked her multiple times:
“I was putting my hand over my face and telling him I was sorry. He would start kicking me, telling me I was a stupid b*tch [and] don’t ever get in his business.”
Jones said that March 2013 is when Kelly began forcing Jones to have sex with other women, first introducing her to one of his other girlfriends by bringing her in naked and making her perform oral sex on Jones. “He told me, ‘I raised her. I’ve trained this b*tch. This is my pet,'” Jones said. She went on:
“He videotapes everything that he does, and sometimes he’ll just make you watch what he’s done to other girls or girls that he had be together. He would masturbate to that and then have you give him oral sex while he’s watching what he did with somebody else on his iPad.”
By August 2013, Jones was in a bad mental state, saying that “his voice scared me, seeing that he called scared me, hearing a door open and close scared me.” It was at this point that Jones felt her only ways out were suicide or murder:
“I just said, ‘I’m gonna kill myself and it’s gonna be his fault. I can either kill myself or kill him. What use am I when I walk out of here?'”
In September 2013, Jones told Kelly she was taking a trip to Dallas to see her son, but she actually made her escape, since she never returned to Chicago. That November, Jones met up with Kelly in Dallas for what would ultimately be their last in-person contact:
“I walked on the bus and I was like, ‘Hey daddy!’ And I went to go hug him and he was like, ‘B*tch, I’m not giving you sh*t’ and he was just attacking me. I knew he wasn’t going to kill me, but it was a lot of force. I was thinking, ‘I’m not going to call the police.’ I just felt so stupid.
“[He was] instilling the fear back in me. When a person sees that you’re not calling the police or the press on them… it’s like, ‘Let me make my mark so you’ll be afraid.’ And it worked.”
Now, Jones says she’s setting up a nonprofit organization called Stop Protecting Your Abuser:
“By me being silent, it allowed him to feel untouchable, that he could keep things going as long as he could pay people off and put enough fear and shame in us that you would never speak on it again. Staying silent absolutely protects your abuser.”
Find the full feature story here.