Former “Real Housewives of Atlanta” star Porsha Williams is opening up about an uncomfortable experience she had with R. Kelly that led her to speak with authorities.
“I realized it was my opportunity to help anyone who’s been hurt by him,” she tells PEOPLE in this week’s issue. “There had been so many other instances where I had been abused by men that my mentality [at that time] was of an abused person, and that it was okay for me to be treated like that.”
In her new memoir The Pursuit of Porsha, Williams, 33, detailed the interaction saying that after meeting with a friend of Kelly’s about launching a music career, she was flown to Chicago to meet the singer and potentially work with him. When she got to Chicago, the then 25-year-old Williams was taken to Kelly’s home, instead of a recording studio as she expected. After being left in a room for hours, Williams shared that R. Kelly joined her in the room and told her to take off her clothes.
“I’ve already put myself in this position. This is what you’re supposed to do. You have to. There is no turning back,” she recalled in her memoir.
The Bravo star said she had two additional meetings with Kelly and encountered several young women living in his home. She decided to cut ties with Kelly after waking up one day and hearing a woman being beaten in another room.
For years, she kept the encounter a secret saying “It’s not something you want to tell your mom, because my mom is a very strong woman and she did her very best in raising me,” says Williams. “And I think for any woman or man who’s been in an abusive situation, you don’t want to tell your parents because you don’t want them to think that they had let you down in any way. I don’t want her to think that she had done anything wrong. And so I took it upon myself.”
“But I was glad when I did, she was glad that I told her and we talked about it,” Williams adds. “She told me some of her experiences. And we just talked about how this should be told so other women don’t have to go through it.”
