R. Kelly is facing more allegations of physical, mental and sexual abuse in a new feature by Rolling Stone. DJ Kitti Jones, an ex-girlfriend of Kelly and member of the inner circle mentioned in Buzzfeed’s story about the singer’s alleged sex cult, opened up about the alleged torment she faced during her relationship with the R&B superstar.
Jones claims the abuse began in November 2011 after she confronted him about the now infamous video that was at the heart of Kelly’s child-pornography trial. The conversation took place via phone while she was going to Dallas around Thanksgiving. When she returned to Chicago, an enraged Kelly kicked and slapped her multiple times on their drive home.
“He would start kicking me, telling me I was a stupid bitch [and] don’t ever get in his business,” she told Rolling Stone.
Jones alleges that she was abused 10 times in her first year living with Kelly. The frequency increased in the subsequent year, but briefly stopped during his 2012 Single Ladies tour.
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“The abuse was heavy before the tour,” she said. “Then when the tour came, he treated me like a princess. I just thought, ‘Why would I walk away from this?'”
Kelly even implemented Jones into his live show. She believes the singer changed his behavior because she knew so many of his darkest secrets.
“I think he knew leading up to the tour that I was just over it,” she recalled. “He knew that I was holding all these secrets that I had learned being in the inner circle and that I could probably be the one to nail him. So him taking me on that tour was like, ‘Let me make sure I treat this one a certain way.'”
But Jones’ respite from abuse did not last long. After moving from Trump Tower to a recording studio with living quarters with other women, the abuse resumed. Cameras monitored the women’s every move. Kelly punished any woman that dared to leave her room.
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A frequent punishment for Jones was taking away her cell phone, which prevented her from being able to order food. After two months at the studio, Kelly began using starvation as a punishment for Jones. She said the longest she went without food was two and a half days.
Although multiple women lived at the studio together, they were largely kept from interacting with anyone else. The women had to look down while walking down a hallway to avoid looking at any other men there. Bringing up the relationship to a fellow resident was grounds for punishment.
“If you disclose your relationship with him [to another woman] – how long you’ve known him or whatever – you can get beat,” Jones claims. “He doesn’t want in any way for one girl to feel more like, ‘Oh, we’re closer than you guys.’ Even though we knew deep down we’re all living there, we didn’t address it.”
In a particularly salacious revelation, she recounted an introduction to a new girlfriend that involved the woman crawling on the floor while naked and performing oral sex on her.
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“He told me, ‘I raised her. I’ve trained this bitch. This is my pet,” she remembers.
From March to September 2013, Kelly allegedly forced Jones to have sex with other women.
“You can’t say no because you’re going to get punished,” she said. “You just become numb to what’s happening. It’s so traumatic the things that he makes you do to other people and to him.
“Ninety-nine percent of the time, I didn’t want to do it and I would tell him I didn’t want to do it. It was the most horrible thing. People look at it and go, ‘Oh, you’re grown.’ No. You have to actually be there to know exactly what it felt like for a person to overpower you and make you feel like there’s nothing for you outside of him.”
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According to Jones, Kelly also videotaped all of his sexual encounters.
“He videotapes everything that he does, and sometimes he’ll just make you watch what he’s done to other girls or girls that he had be together,” she said. “He would masturbate to that and then have you give him oral sex while he’s watching what he did with somebody else on his iPad.”
Jones was finally able to escape the situation, which at one point had her contemplating suicide, in September 2013 by telling Kelly that she wanted to visit Dallas to take her son shopping for school supplies. She packed two suitcases and left all her possessions in Chicago, never to return.
She faced Kelly’s abuse one last time after leaving when he came to Dallas for a show two months later. The two met up, supposedly under the pretense of Kelly returning some items she left, and things got violent on his tour bus.
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“I walked on the bus and I was like, ‘Hey daddy!'” she said. “And I went to go hug him and he was like, ‘Bitch, I’m not giving you shit’ and he was just attacking me. I knew he wasn’t going to kill me, but it was a lot of force. I was thinking, ‘I’m not going to call the police.’ I just felt so stupid.”
Jones said the last time she talked to Kelly was in May 2017.
“He said, ‘If someone came to you right now and asked them how I treated you, you can’t fucking say that I didn’t treat you good,'” she revealed. “‘You had a roof over your head. You went shopping. You didn’t have to want for shit. So you can never go around and say that I was a monster like other people say that I am.’ I was so scared when he was talking to me. I was like, ‘This guy really thinks he did me a favor.’ He doesn’t look at the sexual stuff as scarring and damaging people.”
Rolling Stone presented Kelly with the allegations. A representative for the singer denied everything in a statement to the publication.
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“Mr. Kelly is aware of the repeated and now evolving claims of [Ms. Jones],” Kelly’s rep wrote. “It is unfortunate that Ms. Jones, after public statements to the contrary, is now attempting to portray a relationship history with Mr. Kelly as anything other than consensual involvement between two adults. As stated previously, Mr. Kelly does not control the decision-making or force the actions of any other human being, including Ms. Jones, by her own admission. Any claim of wrongdoing of any kind or of mistreatment of any woman by him is false, ill-motived and defamatory.”
