Additional revelations have been made following the release of the final installment of Lifetime’s “Surviving R. Kelly” documentary.
According to legal documents between the disgraced singer and Aaliyah, R. Kelly silenced the then 15-year-old and her family with a non-disclosure agreement, following their marriage annulment.
The claims were made in the final installment of the docuseries, which aired on January 2nd and 3rd, and are reportedly based on Kelly’s 2022 federal trial, in which the NDA was introduced as evidence. Jane Doe #1 in the trial was the late Aaliyah.
Aaliyah’s story is used in “Surviving R. Kelly” to highlight her as a victim of the now-convicted singer, after the music industry and the media slandered her marriage to the disgraced artist in the 1990s.
Aaliyah was introduced to R. Kelly by her uncle Barry Hankerson, who was also her music executive and manager, before the recording of her 1994 debut album, “Age Ain’t Nothing But a Number,” when she was 14 years old. Kelly was a mentor as well as the album’s lead songwriter and producer, with rumors of a relationship between the two circulating shortly after the album’s release the following year. Kelly had been 27 years old at the time.
In August 1994, the two were married in secret. At the time, Aaliyah was 15, but her age was misrepresented on the marriage license as being 18. Aaliyah’s parents subsequently annulled the marriage in February 1995.
In the documentary “Surviving R. Kelly,” many from R. Kelly’s camp who were present when the two wedded expressed their remorse about the marriage in on-camera interviews. The alleged legal arrangement that was made between R. Kelly and Aaliyah’s family is revealed in new detail by those who were close to both R. Kelly and Aaliyah.
According to a statement that was included in the Lifetime documentary series “Surviving R. Kelly,” members of Aaliyah’s family declined to speak to the documentary’s producers.
According to Gem Pratt, a former security guard and childhood friend of R. Kelly, who featured in “Surviving R. Kelly,” Aaliyah’s father was enraged by the marriage and compelled the annulment. Pratt claims that Aaliyah’s family entered into a legal agreement with Kelly that guaranteed they wouldn’t pursue legal action against him for the unlawful marriage once it was dissolved. In exchange, R. Kelly allegedly gave Aaliyah’s family a financial incentive by selling them the rights to his first three albums.
Pratt stated in the documentary, “Her dad didn’t want her anywhere near him.”
The marriage was presented as a strategy by many on-camera witnesses in “Surviving R. Kelly” to help R. Kelly escape jail time for statutory rape of a minor.
According to a prosecutor who featured as a legal expert in the docuseries, Kelly was “running a criminal enterprise” with the help of enablers in his camp, who had a financial incentive to look the other way.” The final installment covers everything from Kelly’s three decades of abuse of minors flown across state lines for private meetings to flight bookings coordinated by his enablers.
“He couldn’t do this by himself. It’s impossible… It’s clear as day there were enablers,” Pratt stated. Before later adding, “This was not a one-man operation. Most people in that camp knew that a lot of these girls were underage. They had to.”
The NDA that R. Kelly used against Aaliyah was discovered ahead of R. Kelly’s trial by journalist Jim DeRogatis, who initially broke the story of R. Kelly’s sexual abuse over two decades ago. DeRogatis said in an interview a few years ago that the annulment and Aaliyah’s legal case against R. Kelly had been sealed in relation to the documents that had been presented to him.
He explained, “It’s a harrowing document. A non-disclosure agreement on both her part and Kelly’s, vowing not to pursue further legal claims for physical abuse. So, it wasn’t just an underage sexual relationship, he hit her, allegedly, according to that court document.”
Executive producer Jesse Daniels recently detailed the production team’s perspective on filming the documentary, stating that they were careful not to exploit Aaliyah in the docuseries and aimed to highlight the abuse she tragically faced as a teenager from R. Kelly.
Daniels told Variety, “We have had a lot of conversations about how to tell Aaliyah’s story every time because we really want to be respectful of her legacy. But what she went through, we can’t turn our backs on,”
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With £1m what would you do: I would do my part to provide opportunities to the less fortunate. Then do my best to change the world in my own way through sports and talent building.
