Photo credit: Sebastian Kim
R&B singer R Kelly has been accused of sexually abusing a girl since she was 14 years old, allegedly grooming the teenager to be his ‘sex pet’.
This is the latest in a string of allegations against the star relating to the abuse of young women at the hands of Kelly. His former girlfriend Kitti Jones, in a BBC3 documentary, R Kelly: Sex, Girls and Videotapes, made the claims.
During the two years she dated Kelly from 2011 onwards, 34-year-old Jones says she was groomed by him, and forced to have sex with him and others at least 10 times in what she describes as a ‘sex dungeon’.
‘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,’ Jones said.
The unnamed woman was made to ‘crawl on the floor towards me and perform oral sex on me, and he said, “This is my fucking pet, I trained her. She’s going to teach you how to be with me,”’ she alleged.
Kelly has previously denied accusations of sexual depravity, abuse or violence against women. In 2008, Kelly was found not guilty of child pornography charges after he was accused of filming and photographing sexual encounters with a 14-year-old girl.
He has reportedly made out of court settlements with a number of women, including in 1996 Tiffany Hawkins, who said she had a sexual relationship with him for three years from the age of 15. Kelly is also believed to have married the late star Aaliyah when she was only 15 years old.
This isn’t the first time Jones has spoken out against Kelly. In October 2017, she revealed in an interview with Rolling Stone that kelly physically abused her after she confronted him over the alleged child abuse images: ‘He would start kicking me, telling me I was a stupid bitch [and] don’t ever get in his business.’
In the recent BBC documentary, Jones says Kelly was ‘very abusive, physically, mentally, verbally. I think he gets some sort of satisfaction within himself, knowing that he’s taking control over other people.’
And in July 2017, Jones and three other women spoke out against Kelly in an investigation by reporter Jim DeRogatis for BuzzFeed News. The women accused him of ‘brainwashing’ a number of women into a sex cult, where Kelly demanded sex, controlled what they wore and when they could use the bathroom or their phones.
Kelly and his legal team swiftly denied the claims, with the musician saying he would ‘work diligently and forcibly to pursue his accusers and clear his name’.