Rethink Resources

So R. Kelly was found not guilty last Friday afternoon of child pornography charges. It turns out I know the State’s Attorney prosecuting the case, Shauna Boliker, since we have been at many meetings in Chicago about youth in the sex trade. Chicago is my hometown and it was widespread knowledge that R. Kelly liked to have sex with minor girls and that he liked to videotape it. The videotapes were being distributed as bootlegs for years (and still are). Before he got more famous but was known in the Chicago area as an up and coming artist, he was known to hang outside southside Chicago high schools to find new girls to accompany him to parties, for a ride in the car and to have sex.

But the jury saw a tape that was a fourth generation copy and a prosecution that couldn’t put the young woman (now 23, then somewhere between 13 and 14) on the stand because she denied being on the tape and all of the allegations. Many of the initial charges were dropped or dismissed early on for lack of evidence.

Many are attributing the lack of a complaining “victim” or even her parents to the resulting verdict like here in a Chicago Tribune article Girl’s denial blurred case. It’s puzzling to me why prosecutors are not going ahead with cases where you do have a young person who wants to go to court (and as an advocate and rape crisis counselor, I’ve seen this plenty of times) and yet, they go forward on these cases.

Perhaps the Cook County State’s Attorneys office believes what this former prosecutor was quoted saying in the above article;

“When you have someone who has some potential influence, you don’t want the public to feel like this guy is getting a break because he’s famous, that this guy is getting a break because he is R. Kelly,” Robertson said. “You want to keep the commitment to the public that you are prosecuting everyone equally.”

Problem is that prosecutors are not charging all the adults who are having sex with minors or even the ones who are making videotapes of it. It totally appeared in the Chicago area that R. Kelly was being selectively prosecuted. As this Chicago Tribune columnist points out, To many girls, sex with adults just a part of life. She quotes one young woman:

“I understand the statutory rape law,” said Young, who was leaning on the gray metal barricades of a media holding pen, chatting with three idle cameramen. Rhinestones glittered on the back pocket of her blue jeans. “But it happens every day. When I was 15, I was having sex with a 25-year-old man. Why’s R. Kelly’s crime magnified?”

The columnist later points out:

(S)he was undoubtedly correct that what R. Kelly is accused of doing on that videotape—whether or not he did it—isn’t all that different from what goes on in many parts of Chicago. Girls, and not only poor ones, are growing up in a world where it makes sense to them to trade their bodies for a pair of jeans or gym shoes.

Many teens and young women have described the same to me; that having sex with older men means getting stuff - clothes, access to parties and clubs that you can’t get into otherwise, and much more. This is as much a part of the conversation as talking about the purpose of statutory rape laws. And, to be clear, R. Kelly was not facing statutory rape charges. I believe they were dropped early on for lack of evidence and in Illinois its actually a charge of aggravated criminal sexual assault.

Again from the column:

“Some teenage girls out here put themselves in adult situations,” she said. “They do it for the thrill of the ride. Just take a poll of teenage girls. Being with an older man is something teenage girls brag about: ‘He chose me.’ “

This is an example of where the public is at on conversations about youth having sex with older men, potentially in exchange for stuff. The conversation on the street or hair salons in Chicago (and probably all over) was that this girl wanted it and potentially just wanted more out of R. Kelly to keep quiet. And plenty has been alleged that it kept her parents out of the courtroom too.

This is also what I thought when I read this article Victim or vixen? Contrasting views at R. Kelly trial. It puzzled me at first because neither the prosecution or the defense tried to portray the young woman as a “vixen.” In fact the defense went out of their way to talk about the young woman as R. Kelly’s goddaughter and a talented, smart young person.

But the idea is that whoever was the young woman on the videotape having sex - she must be a “vixen.” Even though people seeing the tape have asserted not only that it’s the young woman in question but she’s a minor at the time (13 or 14 years old is the estimate). The defense tried to sidestep the minor question by just saying it wasn’t her or R. Kelly. But then:

To bolster their argument that the female on the tape and the alleged victim couldn’t be the same person, the defense has taken frequent opportunities to praise her character. “[She] is as sweet, as nice and as lovely a person there is,” Adam said during opening statements. He juxtaposed that image with the female in the video, who takes money from the man before having sex with him. “The woman on that tape is getting paid,” he said. “The woman is a prostitute, not a victim.”

Ah yes, so now we come to the classic defense: if she takes money, she couldn’t possibly have been victimized.

I got to hand it the lawyers, although R. Kelly certainly paid them enough. They delayed the trial until few could feel any sense of urgency about the case. They got many charges dismissed. Their strategy paid off.

I’m surprised this was tried in county/state court and not federal. I think the feds are far better prepared to take on child porn cases. Maybe they didn’t want to touch it. I’ve definitely learned that the feds don’t really like to pursue cases they don’t really feel confident they can win. But the State’s Attorneys should have at least sent the tape to Quantico for analysis, maybe they could have improved the quality a bit. Maybe I just watch too much CSI.

As one commentator put it in his piece Black Women the Real Losers in R. Kelly’s Sex Trial

young black artists such as Kelly rekindle the vilest of racial and sexual stereotypes about young black males. Their artistic degradation has had especially dangerous consequences for black women. In Kelly’s case the victims of his sexual vandalism, as witnessed by settlements of other lawsuits against him for having sex with underage teens, were black women.

That’s deep to think about. And oh yeah, you did know he’s paid out of court settlements to other young women for similar charges? I guess that wasn’t permitted to be talked about in this trial either.

As the prosecution chalks up this verdict to “If we do anything with this prosecution, we show the world how difficult it is to prosecute” child pornography, I would suggest it has way more to do with the kinds of real conversations we need to have in our communities about how this happened, how everyone knew for years and passed the tape around and what we want to be different.