Soulless Read online

  In the early 2010s, some rappers on the city’s nihilistic drill scene (and many in the out-of-town media) began calling the South Side “Chiraq,” ignoring statistics that don’t even place Chicago in the top twenty cities nationally for the murder rate per hundred thousand residents. The numbers were no worse during Kelly’s childhood, but numbers don’t tell the whole story. On paper, Chicago is one of the most diverse cities in America, equal parts black, white, and Latinx, but its seventy-seven neighborhoods are also heavily segregated. The South and West Sides often seem like different cities from the rest of Chicago. White, brown, and black residents live, work, and play separately. As Natalie Moore argues in The South Side: A Portrait of Chicago and American Segregation, that policy of separate and unequal is the root cause of the poverty and crime that prevail in the black community and which sometimes dominate the city’s public image.

  At the same time, the South Side is “a magical place . . . the heart of black America,” Moore writes, with no disrespect to Harlem. Those who don’t see the charms are missing big backyard barbecues for extended family and neighbors, daylong church picnics in the parks sponsored by tight-knit congregations that will pay medical bills or rent when a worshipper loses her job, the Bud Billiken Parade back-to-school celebration every August, and the music—everywhere, the music, real-deal electric blues and gospel (not the tourist crap), house and hip-hop, and the deep-cut soul and R&B tracks many call “dusties.”

  Basketball and music became Kelly’s twin passions. He began playing ball at age five and never stopped. At age seventeen, he played on a club team based in the Ida B. Wells Homes in Bronzeville with local legend Ben Wilson. Kelly appeared in ESPN’s 30 for 30 documentary Benji and recalled playing with his friend. “I always wanted to make people think I’ma shoot the ball,” Kelly said, “but then I’d throw this incredible, crazy, magical pass, and Ben used to always love the passes.” Tragically, Wilson was shot to death during an altercation in November 1984 near Simeon High School.

  “Every kid’s dream coming up in the ’hood is to be a pro basketball player,” Kelly told Dave Hoekstra of the Sun-Times in 1997. That summer, he realized his dream for one season playing with the Atlantic City Seagulls in the short-lived semi-pro United States Basketball League. The USBL’s rules allowed each team one spot on its roster for a “celebrity” player. “It wasn’t a gimmick. He’s a ballplayer. He can play,” owner Ken Gross said, but Hoekstra noted that in five games, Kelly played for a total of twenty-four minutes.

  Joann first instilled the love of music in Robert with the dusties she spun at home. Some of her favorites became his own, including Stevie Wonder, Al Green, and Donny Hathaway, the smooth-voiced Chicago soul man who died by suicide after “The Ghetto” and “This Christmas” made him a star. (The Rev. Jesse Jackson conducted his funeral.) Joann’s singing also captivated her sons, and sometimes Robert and his half brothers, Bruce and Carey, played her Pips while she channeled Gladys Knight.

  “Momma Joann could sing her butt off,” Robert says in his book. “People said she sounded like Gladys Knight and Aretha Franklin mixed together. Every time she’d open her mouth to sing—whether it was in church, in a club, or outside on the porch—I would watch the people to get their reactions.”

  At age five, Kelly claims to have been smuggled inside a lounge, hidden in a drum case. He recalls being overwhelmed by “clouds of smoke, swells of laughter, women’s sweet perfumes, the strong smell of cigars, and the stink of whiskey,” but his mother’s performance made the most impact. “She was tearing the roof off that little club, and me, well, I was cherishing every minute. The joy of music was the joy of my mother.”

  The musical dichotomy between Saturday night and Sunday morning has always been especially striking on the South Side. Legion were the blues and jazz musicians who stumbled out of the clubs at dawn and into church a few hours later, singing along with the choir. Kelly says he loved hearing Joann belt out secular tunes in the lounge as much as he enjoyed hearing her sing “Amazing Grace” at a storefront church, though she frightened him when she shook after “catching spirits.” He never names their congregation, or even its denomination, and his relationship with religion is ambiguous. “I love parties, don’t get me wrong. I love celebrating. I love kicking it,” he told Lou Carlozo of the Chicago Tribune. “But I had to take a step toward God, because that’s where I come from: that’s where we all come from. . . . I’m not afraid to say that God gave me my talent. I’m not afraid to say that God woke me up this morning. . . . I know that God is the head of my life.”

  From early on, spirituality comforted Kelly at times of stress and loss. In Soulacoaster, he recalls Joann consoling him at age eight after the death of a playmate: “Wasn’t your fault, baby. You couldn’t do anything to save her. Lulu is in heaven now. She’s with the Lord, sweetheart, and you’re with me.” The story of the girl Kelly calls Lulu is one of the most tragic in his book. They played house together in a big cardboard box in the backyard, and he says, “She was my first musical inspiration when it comes to love songs. I can still smell the fragrance of our innocence.” He doesn’t say how they came to be more than twenty miles from his South Side home, but one day, he and Lulu stood across Concord Drive from Beacon Hill Elementary School near the banks of the rain-swollen Thorn Creek. A tributary of the Little Calumet River in Chicago Heights, the creek is prone to dangerous flooding. Some older kids approached and started shoving them, and Lulu fell into the rushing water.

  Helpless, Kelly watched as the fast-moving current carried Lulu away: “I didn’t know how to swim, and neither did she. The other kids were running away, and she was screaming. . . . After what felt like forever, some grown-ups arrived. I explained what had happened and followed them downstream until they came upon a big rock. There was Lulu, her head crushed against the rock. She wasn’t talking, wasn’t moving, but there was a lot of blood coming from her head. . . . Death couldn’t be this real.”

  For years after I first read Soulacoaster, I questioned this story—“the fragrance of our innocence” doesn’t sound like anything Kelly has ever said—and police and county records held no documentation of the incident. Then, in the archives of the now-long-defunct Chicago Homewood Flossmoor Star, I found the obituary of a third-grader one year older than Robert. Louella Simpkins died from drowning in Thorn Creek in July 1974.

  I asked one of the foremost developmental and forensic pediatricians in the United States what lingering effects the sudden, violent death of a childhood playmate could have had on an eight-year-old like Robert. “Childhood traumas certainly can cause an individual to develop abnormal thinking and mental health problems that, if not addressed, can contribute to ongoing problems,” Dr. Sharon Cooper said. “And if you’ve had not just one catastrophic event, but also have been exposed to community violence, if you lived in a household where there may have been intimate-partner violence, and where there may have been other types of childhood adversities, then very often we know that individuals can begin to participate in what we refer to as health-risk behaviors: drug use, alcohol, smoking, and promiscuity.”

  Shy, introspective, and effeminate throughout grade school, according to all my sources, Kelly often turned to his mother for solace or protection when his older half brother, Bruce, or kids in the neighborhood teased and picked on him. “She said he was always the one she worried about,” a friend of the family told me. “She had to protect him around other kids, take him in the other room. She couldn’t leave him with the other kids.”

  In 2000, Kelly told dream hampton of Vibe that he “worshiped his single mother and considered eavesdropping on his mom, aunt, and sister’s kitchen-table talk as important as shooting hoops in the park.” Almost two decades later, when hampton served as showrunner for a six-part docuseries on Kelly, Carey told her, “Robert was not cut from the same cloth of being street. He didn’t come outside.” Added Bruce, who was interviewed while in Cook County Jail, “Robert was shy and very timid. I
f you stared at him in his face, he would cry.” Both of his half brothers are bigger, beefier, and fuller of face than Robert, and they don’t resemble him much at all.

  Joann also spent more time with Robert because of the problem he calls “something more than dyslexia.” In Soulacoaster, he says, “When I was a kid, I found out that I couldn’t read or write like other kids. I would worry myself sick that something was wrong with me and that my disability would trap me.” The Chicago Public Schools (CPS) do not release student records to the public, but all my sources confirmed Kelly’s difficulties not only with reading but with basic math. “Literally to shop and get change was a very major problem,” a friend of the family told me. Robert tried to hide his struggles from classmates and teachers, but Joann patiently worked with him at night, trying to tutor him and always encouraging him. She built up his self-esteem and fostered the belief that he’d been blessed, in a way no rich white parent in Lincoln Park or the North Shore suburbs could top.

  “‘You got genius,’ my mother told me after a day at school where kids were laughing at me ’cause I couldn’t read,” Kelly says. “‘One day you’re gonna be famous, baby. . . . I mean famous like Al Green. Famous like Sam Cooke and Marvin Gaye.’” But he also felt deep shame from secrets he didn’t share with anyone until years later.

  “There were always women in our little house at 40th and King,” Kelly says in Soulacoaster. “Cousins, aunties, friends of my aunties, all older women. When my mother wasn’t home, the women ran a little freer. . . . You could see through their blouses. Sometimes they wore bras, sometimes they didn’t. When they walked around in nightgowns or pajamas, you could see their panties and on a few occasions, like on a very hot summer days [sic], they wouldn’t even wear panties. . . . As I crept up in age . . . and made my way through grammar school, I found myself more curious and sometimes aroused; and I was ashamed of being aroused. . . . Growing up with that shame has haunted me throughout my life.”

  On a winter afternoon when he came home early from school, Kelly claims to have walked in on a couple having sex. “You can watch, but you better not say shit to nobody about this,” the woman said. Stumbling upon another encounter, he says the lovers directed him to take a photo with a Polaroid camera. “They got into positions where I could see their private parts. I snapped the picture. When she showed me how it took only a minute to develop, I was amazed. The photographic technology impressed me more than the sex. She grabbed the photo and kept it for herself. I took the memory of them doing the dirty and stashed it inside my mind’s brick box.”

  The “brick box” is a metaphor Kelly or coauthor David Ritz uses several times in Soulacoaster. On yet another evening, after young Robert fell asleep while watching TV on the couch, he claims a woman ten years his senior woke him up by performing oral sex on him. He was eight years old. She also threatened him not to tell—“You better not say shit to no one or else you gonna get a terrible whupping”—and he didn’t. “[G]rowing up in the ’hood, the number-one rule was don’t snitch. . . . No matter how many times it happened, I knew I could never tell anyone. I was too afraid and too ashamed. All I could do was stash the secret—and hide it in my imaginary brick box.”

  Kelly claims the sexual contact moved on to intercourse and continued for about six years. In a 2012 interview with Tavis Smiley, who published Soulacoaster on his own SmileyBooks imprint, Kelly revealed the abuse came at the hands of “a family member.” He repeated that claim in his interview with Chris Heath of GQ, as well as in his epic 2018 track “I Admit.” In 2019, in two podcast and YouTube interviews, as well as in an interview with me, his half brother Carey named their half sister, Theresa, as both his own and Robert’s abuser. “Theresa is the cause of everything happening the way that it did,” Carey told me. A week later, Don Russell, the latest of the singer’s managers, also named Theresa as Robert’s abuser at a press conference. “He was hyper sexual, not because he chose to be, but because of his sister.”

  A devout Christian and a mother now living in another state under a completely different name, Theresa resembles her mom. She has never spoken publicly about her half brothers, and I failed in many attempts to reach her for comment.

  Heath asked Kelly if he realized the relationship was wrong. “At first, I couldn’t judge it,” he said. “I remember it feeling weird. I remember feeling ashamed. I remember closing my eyes or keeping my hands over my eyes. I remember those things, but couldn’t judge it one way or the other fully.” After a couple of years, he added, he began “looking forward to it sometimes. You know, acting like I didn’t, but did.”

  Kelly admitted that the sexual abuse at such a young age had a lasting impact. “It teaches you to definitely be sexual earlier than you should have, than you’re supposed to. You know, no different than putting a loaded gun in a kid’s hand. He gonna grow up being a shooter, probably. I think it affects you tremendously when that happens at an early age, to be more hornier. Your hormones are up more than they would normally be. Mine was.”

  In his interviews with Heath, Kelly also repeated but did not expand upon another story in his book. One day, around age ten, he says an older man close to the family, whom he calls Mr. Blue, invited him into his apartment. The man gave him a piece of watermelon and disappeared to shower. When he reemerged wearing a robe, he exposed himself and offered Robert five dollars to touch his penis. “Before Mr. Blue could say another word, I was running out the door with his voice trailing after me. He was shouting, ‘If you know what’s good for you, boy, you won’t say nothing to no one. Say a word and I’ll cook your goddamn goose!’”

  This time, Kelly says he did speak out, after he learned a friend had a similar encounter with the man. Joann called the police. “They showed up at Mr. Blue’s door. We never saw the man again.” I could find no records of an arrest for exposure or inappropriate sexual contact with a minor in Grand Boulevard or the areas near either house Kelly mentions during that period. “There was a lot of abuse sexually amongst themselves,” a friend of the family told me. “This is out of his mom’s mouth, man. Ms. Kelly told me that Robert was abused by a man, either an uncle or a ‘play-uncle,’ somebody they just called uncle. Robert was very confused regarding it, and I believe very angry with his mom for not protecting him.”

  Kelly’s younger half brother, Carey, told me that “Mr. Henry” exposed himself to all three half brothers, and that he was the one who told their mother. Several of the women who later slept with Kelly told me he’d said he had sexual contact with the man; Carey also said Robert was alone with the man at times, and that he believes things went further between the man and Robert than Robert has publicly admitted. “I want to heal people, because I’ve been through so much in my life, but Robert took the other route,” Carey said. “He started doing what was done to him, but Theresa and Mr. Henry is the person that started that.”

  Many women who’ve slept with him have told me Kelly is bisexual and has sex with other cis males. They say he keeps these encounters “on the down low,” either because of shame or because it conflicts with the image he projects as the consummate ladies’ man on R&B and hip-hop scenes that still are often deeply homophobic. In the clapback track “I Confess,” which Carey released in 2018 in response to his half brother’s song “I Admit,” he raps, “Something ain’t right, something smell fishy / What’s goin’ on? / I confess / What kinda man wanna stay a night at a man’s home? / A fuckin’ fag, gay as hell.”

  The mental health professionals I’ve interviewed say Kelly exhibits many of the common symptoms of childhood victims. Male survivors sometimes struggle with sex addiction, becoming, as Kelly says in his book, “more hornier.” They may suffer from insecurity or paranoia. Kelly says he often sleeps in his bedroom closet, and that gives him “a peace of mind.” They can be plagued by nightmares. “I’ve had dreams of being raped by women,” Kelly told GQ. “I’ve had dreams about being cornered by things. I have dreams about being chased and shot at all the time.”
They may fetishize things they’ve experienced, like voyeurism or documenting their sexual encounters in photos or on video. And some hurt themselves.

  Kelly told dream hampton in Vibe that at age thirteen, some thugs who wanted his Huffy bicycle shot him in the shoulder. “They could’ve just pointed at me with their two fingers, like a fake gun, and I would’ve said, ‘Here, man, take it. I live right down the street. I can walk. Y’all have a nice ride.’” In Soulacoaster, he claims he caught a stray bullet in the shoulder while riding his bike at age eleven or twelve. I could not find a police report for the incident, and a friend of the family told me a different story: “His mom told me what really happened with Robert; very, very depressed, one day, he shot himself with a revolver that somebody had around the house. He told everybody, his friends and whatnot, that he was shot by some thugs that tried to take his bike. I was stunned when she told me all of this.”

  Sometimes, mental health experts say, the abused become abusers. “Whether the victim is a young man or a young woman, a couple of things happen,” says Dr. Charmaine Jake-Matthews, a visiting professor of psychology at Purdue University. “First of all, the individual’s understanding of sexuality is obviously not developed at that age, so they get incorrect messages about what sexuality is and how it is to be expressed. Second, as uncomfortable or inappropriate as those situations are for the victim, such as an eight-year-old boy, they’re also arousing, so your sexual arousal becomes associated with the victimization, the discomfort, the abuse. Lastly, what often happens is that the person knows nothing else to do with it except to act out on it towards other people.”

  To be certain, Dr. Jake-Matthews cautions, “There are many people who have been victimized in that way—more than we would like to know, hear about, or admit—who don’t act out like that; people who have taken that pain, that confusion, and either gotten some help with it or channeled it in quite the opposite direction, becoming a champion to make sure it doesn’t happen to other people.” Jake-Matthews doesn’t believe that’s the case with Kelly, and she has a unique perspective. As a therapist, she has spent her career counseling troubled black teens in Chicago, including many who’ve been victims of abuse. She also sang beside Robert in their high school choir.