I spent almost 20 years reporting on R. Kelly, and nine months trying to find an outlet to publish the story of the “sex cult” that would — finally — get the world’s attention. (An excerpt from Soulless: The Case Against R. Kelly.)
in response to a review I’d written as pop music critic at the Chicago Sun-Times about R. Kelly’s then-current album “TP-2.Com,” I received a fax. “Robert’s problem,” the anonymous correspondent wrote, “is young girls.
I spent a month doing my initial reporting after J. Savage first emailed me. Then I contacted Jessica Hopper, who’d interviewed me about R. Kelly’s troubled history for Editor Jake Malooley had been asking me to contribute to the Chicago Reader, and his deputy Robin Amer had been a colleague at WBEZ. The alt-weekly had recently published a long investigative story about sexual harassment at the vaunted Profiles Theatre, shaking the Chicago theater scene. The Reader was owned at the time by Michael Ferro, a digital entrepreneur with a short attention span and grandiose visions who’d purchased the Sun-Times in 2011.
Frustrated, as I was, with the difficulties of publishing the story after nine months of reporting, the Savages planned to call every news organization in Atlanta and camp out in front of the guest house in Johns Creek where Kelly kept the girls if that’s what it took to get people to pay attention to their efforts to bring Joy home. I did not care about getting scooped.
“Plenty of people were disgusted by Gawker’s airing of the Hulk Hogan sex tape,” Sullivan wrote in the Post, “and, as a result, not unhappy to see the site go out of business. But some of them would be less pleased to know that a story like the R. Kelly reporting — or many others that we don’t know about — might never see the light of day.
BuzzFeed charted more than six hundred “media pick-ups,” online and in print, and I did more than 40 print and broadcast interviews in the first week after publication.
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