‘Surviving R. Kelly’: All of The Mind-Blowing Information From The First Night So Far

‘Surviving R. Kelly’ premiered Thursday on Lifetime as a three-night, six-hour event, and has been making front-page news since.

The first two episodes’ focus points where on the introduction of Kelly’s childhood,career and the climax of his huge stardom, ending just before the trial for the 2002 sex tape. The horrendous first-person narrations alleged physical abuse, manipulation, controlling behaviors, unauthorized tapings of many intimate encounters and so much more. 

Conversations surely sparked all over social media, and expectantly motivated some long-awaited reckoning with Kelly’s supposed actions and what it meant to still support him over the years. 

Former backup singer, Javonte Cunningham, implied that R. Kelly had sex with an underaged girl while others observed. The underage girl was Aaliyah, who dated R.Kelly for some time. This was not the only Aaliyah-related moment of the night. Demetrius Smith, former personal assistant and tour manager for R. Kelly, stated that he was indeed aware of Kelly and Aaliyah’s relationship, in attendance to their secret wedding and furthermore, falsified paperwork that permitted Aaliyah to state she was 18. The young singer was instead, 15 at the time. 

During the first episode, Smith remembered Kelly mentioning at some point, “Man we got Aaliyah in trouble.” R. Kelly believed that Aaliyah was pregnant. 

R.Kelly apparently recruited girls at the age of 14 for sexual endeavors. Cunningham and Lisa Van Alley, two different women, stated that R. Kelly was sexually engaged with girls around the age of 14. Singer,Sparkle, recalled remembering Kelly starting to groom her niece when she was just 12. 

According to Lizzette Martinez, who met Kelly at the age of 17 inside of a mall in Florida, she was pregnant by him while she was still in high school. Martinez later had a miscarriage and shared that Kelly wrote Michael Jackson’s “You Are Not Alone,” which she implied was inspired by the loss. 

There were also claims that R.Kelly made multiple girls frequently have sex in public. Javonte Cunningham recalled Kelly having sexual intercourse with a teenage girl in the studio while several people watched. Martinez remembered being inside the car and being told to “perform sexual behaviors while his friends were around in the back seat.”

R. Kelly’s ex-wife, Andrea Kelly, stated that their wedding was a secret. Kelly’s then-teenage girlfriends did not know about the marriage between him and his dancer, Andrea. Andrea also stated that the marriage itself wasn’t publicized. Bruce Kelly, R. Kelly’s brother, said that neither of Kelly’s brothers attended the wedding Andrea claims that Kelly sprung a fancy ceremony on her without being aware of it. Moving forward to the second episode, she states it was one of the first encounters that  she noticed that he was “controlling,” while Bruce questioned the problem with his brother’s “preference” for “younger women.”