The women accusing singer R. Kelly of controlling, abusive behavior continue to detail their encounters with the singer in a new sit-down with the “Today Show.”
Kitti James spent two years in the singer’s Chicago home and Asante McGee said she dated Kelz for two years beginning in 2014. James, a former DJ, explained she confronted him about the infamous tape at the center of his child pornography case, which led to her first instance of abuse.
She also explained he became extremely controlling, putting women on his phone plan to control who they communicate with. James, who met the girl in the tape as an older woman said she believed he was guilty in his case, also said the women would need to get permission to use the bathroom and eat.
“When I met him I was about a 130 pounds,” she says, noting the star would use food as punishment. “When I left two years later, I was 107 pounds.”
James also explained she didn’t think to move to a new city and state for love would result in Kelly turning “into something else.”
“I feel like I gave up everything and then once I was there, I was just in it,” she says of why she stayed for so long. “And the more I started learning about him, I just got sucked into it and I felt like I didn’t have anything else to go back to.
As for McGee, she explained she met R. Kelly in 2013 during his “Black Panties” tour and said he was a “funny guy.”
Then, in the summer of 2016, she accompanied him on his “The Buffet Tour”
“He controlled me once I moved in,” McGee says. “When I was just flying in back and forth, he would send me texts. [On] Easter 2015, I went to Chicago and I sat in a hotel for three days before even having contact with him. And the day when I was about to leave, he just texted me out the blue and said ‘Come to the studio.'”
McGee explained she took an Uber to the studio at 10 a.m. and his assistant put her in a van. She stayed there until 8 p.m.
Like James, McGee said she also had to ask for permission to use the restroom and noted the women were required to call him “Daddy.”
James agreed adding, “If you didn’t …”
“You would get in trouble,” McGee interjects.
“Yeah,” James says. “Or slapped.”
McGee said there were four women at the home at the time she was there, including Joycelyn Savage, the woman who last year maintained to TMZ she was not being held captive. Her parents have hoped to bring her home and said she seemed brainwashed when they last saw her, according to a 2017 BuzzFeed News report.
McGee says she believes Savage is in a brainwashed state.
“Because the things that he says, he pretty much tries to say that your family is jealous that you’re with him,” McGee explains. “Your family wants to be with him and you’re happy and this is what you need to do and if you disobey him, he would fake cry and make you sympathize.”
Kelly has deemed such accusations “unjust and unfair” and said the media has not spoken to enough women who support him.
“R. Kelly’s music is a part of American and African-American culture that should never —and will never — be silenced,” his team said in a recent statement. “Since America was born, Black men and women have been lynched for having sex or for being accused of it. We will vigorously resist this attempted public lynching of a Black man who has made extraordinary contributions to our culture.”
“That’s bullcrap,” McGee responds to the statement.
