They’d get the rest of the money when that was turned over. Boliker, a high-school homecoming queen who grew up to prosecute pervs and creeps, is known around the courthouse for her caffeinated sunniness. Singer Sparkle, who formerly recorded with Kelly, says Landfair is her niece. To the left of the spine was a mole the size of a crushed fly. What held me back was Reshona.
Kelly got his name back, and Reshona never had to lose hers,” Sam Adam Jr. said at a post-trial press conference.Genson’s defeated counterpart, Shauna Boliker, said that “if we do anything with this prosecution, we show the world how difficult [child pornography] is to prosecute.
That was her niece on the sex tape, she maintained. R. Kelly. (The singer, it should be noted, lives in a gated compound, with bodyguards.) Kelly held hands with his lawyers, forming an expensively dressed prayer chain. Women wagged their index fingers, declaring victory for Kelly and scolding his haters. The girls surged.“We love you, Rob!” Jerhonda Johnson cried, earning a stiff-armed wave from Kelly.Johnson was 18—with the ID to prove it—and planned to spend the next few weeks at the courthouse, testing her personal system of justice: If he’s hot, he must be innocent.“I’ve seen that tape. The jury had only taken a few hours to let him go on all 14 counts of child pornography. How could her testimony compete with his money?
Her father depended on Robert Kelly for work.
One night, according to Van Allen, Kelly drove her from Trax, where she lived in a second-floor apartment, to his house on Chicago’s North Side.
He insisted that Landfair couldn’t be on the tape, because any normal 13-year-old would have bragged to her friends about screwing a 31-year-old Grammy winner. The flat-roofed building had begun life as a church, but Kelly converted it to a pleasure palace, with a pool, a basketball court featuring a mural of Kelly going one-on-one with the Tasmanian Devil (a tribute to Space Jam, the launching pad for one of his biggest hits, “I Believe I Can Fly”)—and a wood-paneled hot-tub room. They wanted him to think they’d talk to the press, and they wanted him to know they had our attention.
Keith flew it to Chicago, where Kelly’s business manager made the payoff.“Where is Keith?” Sam Sr. demanded. And thus began another episode of Let’s Rip Off Rob.Chuck and Keith are Charles Freeman and Keith Murrell.
Sam Adam Sr.—Sam Jr.’s dad—grilled witnesses with a harsh bellow that could make a Psalm sound obscene. When they realized he wasn’t going to repay them with fame, or love, they demanded money. But he says his doubts grew during deliberations about the identity of the female. One thing I’m sure he is not happy about is all his sordid business came out in court, in great detail and subsequently onto the internet, making people much more aware of what he is really like. After Sparkle was shown a copy of the tape in 2001 by an associate of a Chicago personal-injury lawyer, she tried to persuade her siblings to watch it as well.
The duo promised a press conference in Chicago—but gave a different location to every reporter. It wasn’t 100 percent the way her childhood friends identified her. Everyone seemed relieved that the trial was finally over, after six years.Missing, of course, was the man who’d brought all these people together. R. Kelly’s freedom was guaranteed before the trial ever started, because Landfair wouldn’t testify.“Initially, I voted guilty because I thought it was R. Kelly on the tape,” juror Bruce Hutcherson said afterward. Murrell was a member of Talent, an R&B act that was signed to Kelly’s Rockland Records, and sang backup for 2Pac.
Half her family testified to this in court as well. “You have Reshona Landfair. 2008. Now that it’s over, it’s worth asking the question: Did R. Kelly piss on justice?When R. Kelly was arrested in 2002 on charges of child pornography, back before the U.S. invaded Iraq, radio stations stopped playing his music and preachers held CD-snapping rallies. There was no answer.“We were totally used,” I told the MTV reporter, as we waited in the McDonald’s parking lot. On the Get Up on a Room tour, Van Allen simulated sex with Kelly onstage. He was nearly laughed onto California.“You have no idea if that tape was put together from tapes of old footage, tapes of other people, in order to make money off Robert, do you?” Genson asked.“Sir, that’s Robert and Reshona on that tape,” Sparkle replied.