 | sep 9, 2021 19:17 •  1548 •  |
Lizzette Martinez was seventeen when she first met R. Kelly. It was the winter of 1995, and Martinez, a cheerleader at North Miami Beach Senior High School, was at Aventura Mall with her childhood best friend, Michella Powery. At the time, Kelly was twenty-eight and one of the biggest R. & B. stars in the world. He lived in Chicago, but he was in Florida for the season, escaping the cold and working on new music at a local recording studio. “I said to my friend, `Oh, that’s R. Kelly,` ” Martinez recalled, when I first interviewed her, in 2018. “I guess he overheard me, and he came over and gave me a hug, and I was kind of stunned. Then he walked away, and his bodyguard gave me his phone number.” It had been scrawled on a tiny, balled-up piece of paper, she said.
At the federal courthouse in Brooklyn, where Kelly is currently being tried for racketeering and sex trafficking, the jury has heard similar stories about slips of paper with Kelly`s phone number on them. Tom Arnold and Anthony Navarro, both of whom had worked under Kelly, testified to handing the slips out at concerts or wherever Kelly told them to. Two women, testifying anonymously, told the court that they had received such slips of paper. They also alleged that Kelly had sexual contact with them when they were seventeen—one in 1999, after she met the singer at the Rock `N` Roll McDonald`s, in Chicago, and the other in 2015, after she saw him at a concert in Orlando (though she lied about her age to Kelly). Those two women, along with three others, are at the heart of the racketeering charges brought against Kelly by the Eastern District of New York. Kelly has also been charged with the sexual exploitation of a child, bribery, kidnapping, forced labor, and a violation of the Mann Act. (He has pleaded not guilty and denied the charges against him.)
But the prosecution is not done making its case. There are an additional fifteen women and two men who are anonymously cited in the indictment, in order to bolster the government`s claim that Kelly displayed a pattern of predatory behavior. The majority of these additional victims have not yet testified; several have taken the stand, but it is unclear how many more will be called upon to do so. Federal prosecutors have not released a witness list, and have declined to comment about witnesses still to come.
Lizzette Martinez, who has yet to testify, is one of the additional victims. She is referred to by the Eastern District of New York as Jane Doe No. 9. The names on the list of remaining witnesses are just as much a secret to her as they are to the general public; although the prosecution is expected to start wrapping up its case sometime next week, Martinez still doesn`t know if she will end up being called to the witness stand. The uncertainty is taking a toll. At age forty-four, she is chain-smoking cigarettes, even though she never smoked previously. “I get that they have their ways of doing things, but it`s frustrating,” she said, of the prosecutors. “You may or may not have to uproot your life, go to Brooklyn, and sit across from him in a courtroom.”
The other day, Martinez told me, “I wish I never walked into that mall.” After meeting Kelly there, she claims that she and Powery ate dinner with him, his bodyguard, and his manager at the time, Barry Hankerson, at an Outback Steakhouse. “Barry kept looking at me,” Martinez recalled, in 2018. “It`s like he felt bad, you know, like he wanted to help me.” Roughly half a year earlier, Kelly had illegally wed Hankerson`s fifteen-year-old niece, Aaliyah, after producing her wildly successful debut R. & B. album.
Back then, Martinez was an aspiring singer—she was part of an amateur vocal trio—and Kelly, a renowned songwriter and producer who consistently crafted hits for himself and for other artists, allegedly promised to help her with her musical career. But, as another aspiring singer who claims to have been victimized by Kelly testified, he never did. Not long after the dinner, Martinez says that she lost her virginity to Kelly, even though she told him that she was seventeen. (The age of consent in Florida is eighteen.) She said that their relationship continued until early 1999, despite Kelly hitting her on five occasions and pressuring her to engage in some sexual acts against her will. In 1996, she claims to have become pregnant with his child, and, one night, while waiting for Kelly to meet her in a Chicago hotel room, she miscarried. She told me that she tried calling Kelly but was unable to reach him, and went through the experience alone. “I guess it was for the best,” she said. A devout Catholic, she “didn`t want to go through that abortion.”
In the indictment, Martinez`s experiences are reduced to four sentences of dry legalese: “In or about 1995, Kelly met Jane Doe No. 9, a 17-year-old girl and an individual whose identity is known to the government, at a Florida mall and thereafter commenced a sexual relationship with her, in violation of Florida law. On one occasion, Jane Doe No. 9 laughed at a joke by one of Kelly`s associates and Kelly immediately summoned her outside and slapped her across the face for having done so. During their relationship, Jane Doe No. 9 contracted herpes and disclosed her diagnosis to Kelly, who did not admit to having herpes. At the time of her diagnosis, Jane Doe No. 9 was only sexually active with Kelly.” She is cited five more times in the document, in reference to “Kelly`s sexual abuse of minors,” “Kelly`s knowledge that he had herpes, an incurable sexually transmitted disease,” and Kelly`s “common schemes to recruit his victims.”
Ifirst learned of Martinez in 2000, when I began reporting on rumors that R. Kelly sexually abused young girls. Two sources mentioned her to me, without specifying her name, as “the girl from Miami.” It wasn`t until 2018 that I finally heard the specifics of her story, when she spoke with me about it—and for the first time publicly—for a BuzzFeed News article. Martinez said that she had decided to come forward after reading an earlier piece I`d written about Kelly abusing a “sex cult” of six women. Two sets of parents were quoted in the article, saying that they desperately wanted to bring their daughters home. As a mother of twins, a boy and a girl who were in their late teens at the time of the BuzzFeed piece, Martinez couldn`t help but imagine her daughter in that same situation. “I saw it like my daughter, because if she had been walking in the mall—she`s just his type,” Martinez told me. “She would have been a victim.” (Recently, one of the women whose stories prompted Martinez to go public—a member of the so-called cult—testified at Kelly`s trial, as Jane Doe No. 5. Like Martinez, her sexual contact with Kelly began in Florida, when she was seventeen, but their experiences are two decades apart.)
