R. Kelly is supposed to go on trial in Chicago on child-sex charges next month, more than five years after a videotape came to light of a figure the police say is the singer performing various sex acts with and on an under-aged girl.

Hitsville’s ongoing feature, R. Kelly SexFacts™, has been provided as a public service to the many, many folks who have written about R. Kelly but who seem to have been unaware of many of the, ah, pungent aspects of this story.

Or you can think of it all as R. Kelly’s Greatest Hits—”hits,” that is, in the sexual predator sense of the term.

Now it’s time to wrap up, and present the story thus far.

N.B.: this is a compelling tale, but a little bit barfy as well.

And remember, kids: R. Kelly SexFacts”™ are based entirely on reporting in reputable publications!

The R. Kelly case started when Jim DeRogatis, the pop critic at the Chicago Sun-Times, and Abdon M. Pallasch, the paper’s legal reporter, wrote a 3000-word story detailing the Chicago star’s penchant for young girls. It was published way back in December 2000—the day before a sold-out Christmas concert by the singer at the city’s United Center!

The story detailed the first sex suit against Kelly, including the $250,000 out-of-court settlement that resulted. The pair also talked with a woman who said she’d had sex with Kelly as a 15-year-old, and even had sex with him and another girl. Accusations #’s 1 and 2!

According to the story, Kelly met the girls by hanging out with the choir at his old high school, the scamp!

A year later, DeRogatis received a phone call telling him to check his mailbox. In it was a videotape showing Kelly having sex with a young girl. The girl’s aunt identified her, and Kelly. In the tape, the singer called her by her first name; she called him “Daddy.” Accusation #3.

Besides a variety of sex acts, the girl urinates on the floor at “Daddy’s” direction. “Daddy” then urinates into her mouth.

After the tapes came to light, Kelly’s lawyer said this: “The fact is there is no tape of R. Kelly having sex. There have been reports in the media of different tapes, and none of them agrees with the other. If someone does say there is a tape out there, those claims are false—absolutely false.”

The lawyer hired San Francisco investigator Jack Palladino to find out who might be trying to smear Kelly’s name by, presumably, making and releasing a fake videotape!

The Chicago Tribune weighed in, too! Kelly was sued for an “indecent sexual relationship” in 2000 and 2001 with an Epic records intern, who was 17 at the time, the paper reported. (The story named the woman and quoted her attorney.) Kelly settled the matter out of court! Accusation #4.

According to the same story, the same lawyer settled a similar lawsuit that charged Kelly with having sex with yet another girl when she was a minor. (She was named as well.) Accusation #5.

A few months later, the original girl’s aunt, an R&B singer named Stephanie Edwards, who records under the name Sparkle and was once Kelly’s protege, again confirmed, this time in an LA radio interview, that the girl in the video was her niece, who was 14 at the time—and 12 when she met Kelly!

After the interview, the station’s program director said the station’s programmers were debating whether they should stop playing Kelly’s music.

In 1994, Kelly married a 15-year old girl. Married! Her name was Aaliyah Haughton; she was a singer and a protege of Kelly’s with whom, associates have said, he was having an affair. Without telling her what was going on, Kelly arranged an impromptu wedding at a suburban Chicago hotel and then swept her toward a plane. Fortunately, the girl called her parents. They came and got her and, articles have said, the pair never saw each other again. Accusation #6.

As rumors surfaced about the union, Kelly lied about it. But then Vibe magazine found a marriage certificate, on which Haughton’s age was listed as 18. The union was annulled a short time later. (Over the next six years or so Haughton, under the stage name Aaliyah, became a fairly big star before dying in a plane crash in the Bahamas in 2001.)

Aaliyah was the niece of Kelly’s manager, Barry Hankerson.

Boy, wouldn’t you have liked to be a fly on the wall for that conversation? Hankerson must have really given it to Kelly!

Hankerson worked for Kelly another five years.

When the one girl tried to sue Kelly in Chicago, he filed a pre-emptive $30,000 suit against her, charging her with trying to blackmail him. He hired high-powered NY publicist Dan Klores—and got mentions of his lawsuit in several large papers.

The girl’s suit went unpublicized!

Reported the Chicago Sun-Times, several years later:

“Many celebrities are constantly being harassed and sued, and more often than not, they decide to settle,” a Kelly spokesman working with Klores told the Daily News in 1996. “Kelly has decided, ‘No way.’”

But sources said that Kelly reconsidered that hard-line position and settled with [the girl] on January 23, 1998, just four days after she gave a seven-hour deposition. The sources said that Kelly’s attorneys were shocked by what they heard in the session, and that Kelly quickly ended the case by paying Hawkins a quarter of a million dollars.

In 1998, Kelly picked up a 16-year-old girl at the so-called “Rock ‘n’ Roll McDonalds” in Chicago, just north of the Loop. They had an affair that lasted until she told him she was pregnant, GQ reported; one of Kelly’s associates drove her to the abortion clinic. Accusation # 7.

Kelly grew up on the South Side of Chicago. The profile of Kelly in GQ magazine says that “family members and early associates” said that Kelly had been abused by an older neighborhood man as a child.

They also said he had tried to commit suicide as a youth, but covered up the story of the resulting bullet wound by saying some kids who had been trying to steal his bike shot him.

Associates of Kelly have said as well that he can barely read or do basic math; he later confessed in a Vibe magazine story to being illiterate.

According to GQ, Kelly is estranged from his siblings and didn’t take care of his mother, who drove a beat-up car and could not pay her medical bills. After she died of cancer in 1997, Kelly declared that he had “found the lord”!

After the original Sun-Times story that revealed his pattern of preying on young girls, Kelly kept getting into trouble! The Chicago lawyer who handled the first four legal cases against Kelly represented at least one other victim as well. Accusation #8!

GQ also reported that Kelly’s personal hygiene left a lot to be desired; he could wear the same clothes for a week, the story said. Said one of his former assistants: “I could never understand the women. I’d be like, ‘How could you be with him when he stink like that?’”

Smelly Kelly!

The videotape that really got Kelly into trouble was described as “well lit” and “crystal clear” by those who have seen it. Originally, his contention was that it was not he in the video; that’s what he told the interviewers in a cozy chat on BET in 2002. More recently, his lawyer has said his contention will be that the woman on the tape wasn’t underage.

Hey, isn’t this all part of the glamorous world of the modern pop star? A British magazine seems to have been the only publication to have asked Jim DeRogatis, the reporter who broke the R. Kelly story originally, about what the tape was like. DeRogatis said:

“[T]his is not Tommy Lee and Pam Anderson. It’s not fun and games. This girl has the disembodied look of a rape victim and he’s urinating in her mouth. It’s a sickening spectacle.”

In another interview, Kelly said:

“I’m not who these people are talking about. I’m not a criminal. I think I’m the only one that can understand how [Osama] bin Laden feels […] being someone that’s hunted down or being someone that’s constantly made to look like the devil himself.”

After the video of him having sex with a 14-year-old came to light, according to GQ, Kelly grabbed his “spiritual advisor,” the Rev. James Meeks, of Chicago’s Rainbow Coalition, and went to a Chicago church to sing for kindergarteners.

There are actually three R. Kelly sex tapes! There’s the one with the girl that is at the center of the case; another of an adult woman, who is suing Kelly for filming her without her knowledge; and a third of another young girl, who as yet has not been identified. Allegation #9.

On one of his CDs, Kelly thanks the girl who has been identified as being on one of his sex tapes. Kelly describes her as his “goddaughter”!

To R. Kelly, the oversight of a child’s religious upbringing is not complete until he’s urinated in her mouth.

And filmed it.

After Kelly was arrested for making that videotape, his label, Jive Records, released a statement that said: “R. Kelly has been with Jive Records for 11 years, and we fully support him and his music.”

Kelly’s manager, Barry Hankerson, left the singer’s employ in 1998, writing a letter telling Kelly’s label and associates that the singer “needed psychiatric help for his compulsion to pursue underage girls.” This was five years after Kelly married Hankerson’s underaged niece, the singer Aaliyah.

It’s fair to say, in this context, that Kelly’s behavior must have hit a pretty high bar.

Kelly or his representatives have said a) that it is not he in the video; b) that it is he but that the video was faked; and c) that it is he but the girl is over 18. One suspects at the trial his attorney will at some point take refuge in a Maxwell Smartian, “Would you believe he has a long-lost twin brother….?”

In one of his infrequent interviews, this one on Primetime Live, Kelly was asked about these predilections. “For an older man to have sex with an underage girl—do you see that as immoral?” he was asked. “Rephrase the question,” Kelly said. The reporter said: “For an older man to have sex with an underage girl—someone under 17—do you see that as immoral, if they’re in love?” Kelly responded: “I really can’t be the judge of that.”

In an interview with Hip Hop Soul magazine, Kelly said, “I’m the Ali of today. I’m the Marvin Gaye of today. I’m the Bob Marley of today. I’m the Martin Luther King, or all the other greats that came before us.” When asked about the quote by a British writer, he replied: “I’m not saying I’m Martin Luther King. I’m still surprised it got taken out of context like that. I’m inspired by those people, I want to be like them. There’s nothing wrong with dreaming.”

Kelly married in 1996 and has three kids. When Essence magazine asked his wife if she believed in the charges against Kelly, she said: “C’mon. Who would believe all that? That’s why they call them allegations.”

Later, his wife had a protection order taken out against him; she said he had hit her after she told him she wanted to leave him. She later rescinded it but later got the divorce.

In 2006, Kelly’s brother Carey went on a radio show, Vibe.com reported, and said R. Kelly had skimped on their mother’s tombstone, because she had refused to leave the siblings’ step-father: “This was the man who raised us when our dad walked away like a coward. My mom didn’t leave him, so when she died, her tombstone was only $500.” He also said Kelly was a bisexual, and had slept with a young relative. Allegation #10.

Another British interviewer wrote this after waiting six hours to talk to the singer: “[Kelly] circumnavigates every subject listlessly but a question about God catches his attention and he comes to life and launches into long, rambling answers, even if they bear only a vague relation to the questions. He never takes his dark glasses off. It is one of the most intriguingly bonkers 20 minutes I have ever spent with a celebrity, beating encounters with Stevie Nicks, Geri Halliwell, Yoko Ono and both Beckhams.”

R. Kelly on love: “You come to appreciate love more when you in love. Just as you like cereal until you come to your favorite kind of cereal and then you can appreciate cereal even more now, you know?”

Many of Kelly’s associates have been quoted saying they thought he was sick, or had an uncontrollable compulsion to have sex with young girls. Perhaps the strongest evidence of this is that, while already under indictment for filming himself having sex with a child, he was found to have in one of his houses a digital camera with new photos of him having sex with an underaged girl. Allegation #11.

One suspects that many six year olds, having been caught with one illicit chocolate chip cookie, would proceed posthaste to do away with another they had hidden underneath their pillow. Kelly, who associates have said is illiterate, can’t do simple math, and has an, um, redolent disdain for personal hygiene, also seems kinda dumb! The search that produced the camera was later disallowed by a judge, so Kelly was never prosecuted for those photos.

After the notorious videotape came to light, R. Kelly’s longtime publicist, Regina Daniels, had this to say when asked about the child sex charges: “There are a lot of people who are very much a player-hater of Robert. . . . All I can go by is the years that I’ve worked with him and what I’ve seen. I’m not saying anybody is beyond doing what I don’t see, but I’m not looking under the covers with him. All I know is that he has presented himself to me to be a respectable person and that is what I can go by.”

(Emphasis added.)

If Daniels had looked under his covers, she might have found someone she recognized. Daniels quit earlier this year after discovering that Kelly was shtupping her daughter.

The daughter, thank goodness, was 21 at the time.

After she left, Kelly’s camp had this to say:

It’s hard to take seriously the moral outrage expressed by George and Regina Daniels over R. Kelly’s relationship with Mr. Daniels’ adult daughter, Maxine.

On this, you have to agree with him.

The judge in the case noted in March he had held 112 hearings on the case thus far. The 113th was held April 1; both sides are debating motions under seal.

Kelly is scheduled to go to trial—finally—May 8.

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The original R. Kelly SexFacts™

More R. Kelly SexFacts™

R. Kelly SexFacts™, Part 3: The Godfather Who Shagged Me