The Focus Finally Turns to Aaliyah, in R. Kelly’s Trial

In lower Manhattan, across the East River from the federal courthouse where the R. & B. star R. Kelly is being tried for racketeering and sex trafficking, there is a three-story billboard of his most famous protégé and victim, the late singer Aaliyah, who is portrayed with her eyes closed and her hands on her hips, underneath the message “Aaliyah is coming.” The billboard is meant to promote the recent release of Aaliyah’s music on streaming platforms. (A second, even bigger billboard stands in Times Square.) For years, the only album by Aaliyah available to stream was her début, “Age Ain’t Nothing But a Number,” which Kelly wrote and produced for her in 1994. When that album came out, Aaliyah was fifteen, and a sophomore at what was then called the Detroit High School for the Fine and Performing Arts. Prosecutors claim that Kelly was having sexual contact with Aaliyah and may have impregnated her while she was a minor; he then illegally married her. Although some of the specifics are only coming out now in the courtroom, Kelly and Aaliyah’s relationship was an open secret, and their marriage made headlines at the time.

From the vantage point of 2021, it is hard to imagine how a sexual-abuse scandal involving two of the biggest names in popular music would not derail the alleged abuser’s career. But Kelly thrived as an artist and producer in the years that followed; he would go on to sell a total of more than a hundred million records, including his own and those he crafted for other artists. Sure, this was the pre-#MeToo nineteen-nineties, but other artists had been punished for similar behavior in the past. In 1958, after the rock-and-roll pioneer Jerry Lee Lewis married his thirteen-year-old second cousin Myra Gale Brown, his career “took a nosedive right into the concrete,” Brown recalled, in 2014. Kelly was apparently aware of that earlier scandal, but unfazed by it. “Look at Jerry Lee Lewis,” he once said, according to testimony from the witness stand in Brooklyn. “He’s a genius and I’m a genius. We should be allowed to do what we want—look at what we give to the world.”

Almost immediately after their marriage, Kelly and Aaliyah split, and her career thrived as well—she sold more than two million copies of each of her next two albums, which she made with other producers, and launched a film career. But Kelly wasn’t held accountable for his actions in Aaliyah’s lifetime. In August, 2001, she died in a plane crash in the Bahamas, at the age of twenty-two. Only now is Kelly being prosecuted for the crimes he allegedly committed against her, as well as against nineteen other women and two men, in a case brought by the Eastern District of New York. The first time that Aaliyah’s name was spoken in a courtroom as a victim of sexual abuse was two weeks ago, a few days before the twentieth anniversary of her death, which coincided with the re-release of her music.

“First, I want to tell you about Aaliyah,” Maria Cruz Melendez, an assistant U.S. attorney, said in her opening argument. “Aaliyah met the defendant in approximately 1992, when she was about twelve years old. Aaliyah had a gift. She was a talented singer, and people thought that she could make it far in the industry, so the defendant began to produce and write music for Aaliyah when she was still a child. And shortly after he began working with her, the defendant began to engage in sexual activity with her. And for years while Aaliyah was a minor, too young to even consent to sex, he continued to engage in sexual activity with her that lasted several years.”

Cruz Melendez proceeded to tell the story of how “one night in 1994, while the defendant was on tour,” he got a call from Aaliyah saying she thought she was pregnant. Kelly, who was twenty-seven, and living in Chicago, where the age of consent was seventeen, was worried about being charged with statutory rape, and he immediately flew home. The court soon heard that Kelly, with the help of Derrel McDavid, his friend and accountant at the time, devised a plan to marry Aaliyah. The idea was to “keep Aaliyah from talking,” and to “keep him out of jail if anyone found out” about his sexual contact with her, Cruz Melendez said.

Demetrius Smith, Kelly’s longtime friend and road manager, testified that McDavid gave him five hundred dollars in cash to bribe a Chicago-area official in order to secure a fake welfare card for Aaliyah; Smith also obtained a work I.D., allegedly from FedEx, from a friend of Kelly’s. After getting their marriage license from a clerk in Cook County, Kelly and Aaliyah were married on August 31, 1994, by a Baptist minister in a room at the Sheraton, near Chicago O’Hare Airport. Kelly then got on a plane and flew to the next show on the tour. Aaliyah was supposed to wait for him in Chicago, but instead, she soon went home to her parents in Detroit and told them what had happened.

Rumors about the marriage began spreading in the music world almost immediately, becoming a frequent subject of gossip on Black radio stations. In late 1994, Vibe magazine obtained a copy of the couple’s marriage certificate, which listed Kelly’s real age and Aaliyah’s fraudulent one. Vibe published it that December, with the caption “Signed, sealed, delivered, I’m yours,” but the author, Danyel Smith, wrote that she didn’t get a chance to ask Kelly “what a grown-ass man is doing with a teenage girlfriend.” Meanwhile, Kelly and Aaliyah denied that the marriage had ever happened. “When people ask me, I tell them, ‘Hey, don’t believe all that mess,’ ” Aaliyah told me, a few days after that issue of Vibe came out. “We’re close and people took it the wrong way.”

In 2000, my colleague Abdon M. Pallasch and I reported in the Chicago Sun-Times that, shortly after the marriage, Kelly and Aaliyah had gotten an annulment and had signed a settlement agreement stipulating that they would sever all personal and professional contact, and avoid making any public comments about each other. Kelly admitted no liability or wrongdoing, but he paid Aaliyah a hundred dollars, and Aaliyah and her parents discharged him from any future legal claims pertaining to “emotional distress” and “physical injury or emotional pain and suffering from any assault or battery” that he might have perpetrated against her. The settlement also named two monitors to assure that Kelly and Aaliyah complied with its terms: an attorney for Kelly, and Barry Hankerson for Aaliyah. Hankerson, Aaliyah’s uncle, ran her record company, Blackground Records. He also served as Kelly’s manager for more than a decade, throughout the nineties, both before and after the marriage.

When Hankerson met Kelly, he was a well-known figure in the entertainment business. He’d managed the Winans, a popular gospel quartet, and had produced and appeared in a film with Gladys Knight, his ex-wife. Under Hankerson’s management, Kelly made some of his biggest hits, including “Bump n’ Grind,” “I Believe I Can Fly,” and “I’m Your Angel” (a duet with Céline Dion). After Kelly married Hankerson’s niece Aaliyah, Hankerson began to distance himself from his star client, but he only formally resigned as Kelly’s manager in early 2000, via a letter to Kelly’s attorney, Gerald Margolis, and executives at Kelly’s label, Jive Records. Hankerson has never commented on the record about that split, but, when I asked him about it in 2002, he authorized his attorney to confirm the substance of his resignation note. In the letter, he recommended that Kelly seek psychiatric help for a compulsion to pursue underage girls. (On the witness stand, Demetrius Smith claimed that Kelly fired Hankerson—a position that has also been taken by Kelly’s allies.) When Hankerson stopped managing Kelly, McDavid took over. He then oversaw the second most successful period of Kelly’s career, until late 2013, when he sued the star in a financial dispute. (McDavid is one of two former Kelly employees indicted in the second federal case, brought by the Northern District of Illinois.)

After Kelly, there is perhaps no one alive who knows more about what happened between Aaliyah and Kelly than Hankerson. And there are few others who can speak to the point at which Kelly’s successful musical career may have become “a criminal enterprise,” designed to satisfy his illegal urges, as prosecutors contend it was. But will Hankerson testify at the trial in Brooklyn? I asked him, and he did not reply. Federal prosecutors have not released a witness list, and, when I asked whether they plan to call Hankerson, John Marzulli, the spokesman for the Eastern District of New York, replied, “No comment.”

Hankerson has been busy lately. Earlier this month, he announced that he’d revived Aaliyah’s record label, calling it Blackground 2.0, and he has been running the Aaliyah reissue campaign, which is responsible for the billboards. His efforts are paying off: this past Tuesday, Aaliyah’s second album, “One in a Million,” reached No. 10 on the Billboard 200 chart for the first time. (It had stalled at No. 18 when it was originally released, in 1996.) Hankerson has promised that more music is coming, including previously unreleased tracks, to the delight of Aaliyah’s passionate fans, many of whom were born after her death, and who’ve primarily heard her music via unauthorized YouTube posts or illegal downloads.

Hankerson rarely speaks about what happened between Kelly and Aaliyah, and he has never spoken about it in detail. But, last week, he briefly addressed the situation during a radio interview with the comedian Rickey Smiley. “Of course I was upset,” Hankerson recalled, “and of course I have to really, really consider what my reactions would be. I really found out I wasn’t a hardcore criminal. I couldn’t kill nobody. You know, I’m a Muslim, I went to Minister Farrakhan, and we just prayed about it and just resolved ourselves to let God handle him. And I think that’s what’s going on.”