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The first of the series’ two-part conversation comes to grips with the accusations towards R. Kelly premiered late Friday.
As she did in Part 1, Lisa Van Allen, who’s said to be a survivor of Kelly and was featured in Lifetime’s six-part docu-series “Surviving R. Kelly,” spoke with hosts Jada Pinkett Smith, Willow Smith, and Adrienne Banfield-Norris about her experiences with the alleged predator.
Van Allen, who revealed she started dating Kelly when she was 17 and he was 31, severed ties after years together. She stated she made the choice to leave, after he supposedly made repetitive indications that she buy dresses for her daughter, causing her to become skeptical of his objective.
Throughout the interview, Van Allen shared that she spent most of her life wondering why her birth parents gave her up. Pinkett-Smith then asked if her relationship with Kelly gave her a cold comfort.
“It was misguided, but that’s what I thought it was,” she shared. “Cause I didn’t know. To not have any male role models, how would you know what the love of a male is supposed to be like? You know, I was really pushing for it. I wanted it.”
Allen’s 16-year-old daughter Akeyla and psychologist Dr. Candice Norcott were also featured on Monday’s segment of the show. Norcott, who appeared in the docu-series, afterward used the word “adultification” to describing why people were so tolerant of Kelly’s connection with younger women.
“What we do with girls is that when they start developing, we treat them as adults and when you add race on top of that, what we know is that you see adolescence and children as less innocent- black adolescence. For boys, it starts at 10, but for girls, it starts at 5,” she stated. “When you’re thinking about people saying, ‘Well, they’re grown, so they know what they’re doing. They’re in the studio. You know, she’s standing there seeming like she likes it.’ We as a society are acting like these girls are willing, and we have to own that. We have to recognize how we’re complicit.”
“Just seeing them as more responsible, less innocent, more responsible for themselves than their white counterpart,” she added. “You see that with judges not using their discretion when they’re sentencing. You see that with police officers, resource officers in schools ‘disciplining’ black girls.”
blogged by @DriuneSantanaTv
