R&B singer R. Kelly has been accused by three sets of parents of holding their daughters in an abusive “cult.”
The allegations come via a a, 800-word BuzzFeed News report published Monday morning. Three of R. Kelly’s former associates also spoke with reporter Jim DeRogatis to corroborate the parents’ accusations and adding details of their own.
One associate says “he is a master at mind control.”
The new report claims that the young women became ‘brainwashed’ in R. Kelly’s world after being brought to him by their parents in an effort to further their musical careers.
According to parents and the former associates, R. Kelly has several young women living in his rental homes in Atlanta and Chicago and subjects them to the following treatment:
- He replaces their cell phones with ones specifically used to communicate with him and forbids them to contact their families
- He requires they call him “daddy” and ask permission to leave the studio or their residences;
- He films their sexual encounters with him
- He abuses them physically and verbally
The report doesn’t name the victims, but their identities have been independently verified.
The three associates who have come forward to back the parents’ claims — Cheryl Mack, Kitti Jones, and Asante McGee — say that “six women live in properties rented by Kelly in Chicago and the Atlanta suburbs, and he controls every aspect of their lives: dictating what they eat, how they dress, when they bathe, when they sleep, and how they engage in sexual encounters that he records.”
Some of the parents have contacted the police, but because they are adults in a seemingly consensual relationship there isn’t much they can do.
The report says that welfare checks by police in both Illinois and Georgia over the past year did not lead to charges, and that one of the young women told police she was “fine and did not want to be bothered.”
You can read the rest of the explosive report here.
