I wanted my first piece on here to be foundational. It’s impossible to tell the R. Kelly (Robert Sylvester Kelly) story without going back to the beginning of his career, when this all started. You can’t correctly understand him, the amount of false allegations of abuse and child abuse, without hearing the story of him and Aaliyah correctly and with evidence and testimonies to support it. This will not be a deep dive with court transcripts, screenshots of witness statements, or anything like that. However, I will use the names of all the main people involved. This is just to give some of you a foundation in understanding why and how so many people came down on him with the same lies, repeated year after year. Then eventually, a deepfake child porn tape and fraudulent conviction.

In 1994, I was in Australia, graduating from high school in my final year, and 17 years old, turning 18. Aaliyah was 15, turning 16, and Robert was 26. I wasn’t old enough to go to adult nightclubs yet, so my friends and I would go to a local underage club that played hip-hop and R&B music for under-18s only. It was at this club in Melbourne, Australia, when one of my friends mentioned that Aaliyah and R. Kelly had gotten married. Now, remember that this was 1994, so we had no internet, Wi-Fi, or social media. We had only Vibe magazine and word of mouth to find out about what was going on in the USA regarding hip-hop and R&B music.

Australia has always been isolated from the outside world because of its geography. So, when we received news, music, or movies, most times it was already a month or a few weeks late. But the marriage news came behind news we had already received for months and became well known everywhere: that “R. Kelly and Aaliyah were in what was known as a publicity stunt, a fake relationship.” No one, and I mean no one, batted an eyelid at any of it because in the 90s it was so common with celebrities in Hollywood and the music industry. Even as a child, I understood that sometimes we were being played by celebrities to buy their music or watch their movies because of the “showmance” that they presented until the movie or music came out. Then the relationship died instantly.

No one was offended by it because we all wanted romance in the 90s. We wanted our movie stars to really be in love. We wanted to believe that things were as they were presented in the movies. We didn’t like to think that the movie story wasn’t real, and PR people started to create these fake romances to feed the desires of the public.

So, we laughed off the idea that Aaliyah and R. Kelly were in any kind of relationship, dismissing it as a ‘showmance.’ This was also because we knew R. Kelly (I have to call him R. Kelly for now, for the sake of this story) was a big deal, and any woman presented in that way with him would definitely be trying to use his name to advance her own career. At 17, as obsessed with music as we were, we understood that it was part of the game that some people, especially women (but some men too), used this tactic. This was all before I even found out that years later, before the allegations, Barry Hankerson’s son and employee, Jomo Hankerson, had said on the radio, when asked about Aaliyah and Robert, that ‘no one would work with Aaliyah without R. Kelly back then.’ (In other words, we had to pair her with him.) This was also before I read that Barry Hankerson had been shopping around for a record deal for Aaliyah since she was 11 years old. This man was desperate to make her a star, but everyone said she was just too young and refused her. Until he got the perfect opportunity to force her onto his biggest young star, Robert Sylvester Kelly.

You must remember that I was once just a member of the public looking in, and this is what I already knew for many years (the fake romance that is, not the background). But it wasn’t just my friends and I who knew, the whole industry knew it was fake and for marketing her album “Age Ain’t Nothin But A Number” that she named and wrote on under Robert’s guidance, under Barry Hankerson’s direction and command.

Barry Hankerson was not a caring, kind or loving mentor/manager or uncle. He was rumored to be a real “gangster type thug.” He has a history, allegedly, of exploiting his artists, and I believe that was what he was doing with Aaliyah and Robert all along. Aaliyah had far more to gain though and nothing to lose at all by working with Robert (though if Robert were who they claim and not a protector instead, she could have been in real trouble).

Her name was elevated after the fake marriage, and she became a star almost overnight. The industry then accepted her as one of their own; they started to work with her and help her career. But for Robert, who was under pressure to work with her, under command to follow orders with “the boss’s niece,” it was a scam. It was, to say the least, catastrophic and had the beginnings of him being extorted, blackmailed, and manipulated using this story and false allegations. People later on, who weren’t around or privy to the background story, were easily manipulated by scammers who claimed he preyed on her and that he had an attraction to her and other underage women. He was even manipulated so much that he gave up his rights to the music he wrote for her.

It was never what he wanted. He came to care for Aaliyah very much and even felt protective of her because she was innocent. So, in his mind—knowing him as I do—I know that he was thinking that by helping her career forward in any way he could, he would, in some way, be giving her her biggest dream: giving her power over her own career (because she did feel controlled at the time by others). Robert was always hero-minded; people must understand that is his natural impulse and intention. He is a warrior type who would sacrifice himself for any damsel in distress. He never had a mean, vindictive, or manipulative bone in his body. Even to this day, he can’t help but be kind, sometimes to the most evil people in life. Those who even want to take his life, he will try to love and convince them to change, only becoming more cautious in his more mature days. But the damage was done in his youth because of the Aaliyah story.

Also, his playing the field and dating too many women at the same time opened him to being extorted, blackmailed, and falsely accused. Most people assume it was “cheating” he did. He admits that early on with new fame, he cheated on his early girlfriend and was very ashamed and sorry for it. He has even said how sorry he was that he wasn’t a faithful and better husband (in his early book Soulacoaster and interviews). He has expressed these regrets humbly to deaf ears who seem insistent that he pay with his life instead. But after his divorce, he tried to be real and more open with women that he was dating. But it didn’t work; they just all wanted him to themselves.

He found their jealousy a constant issue, even if he was open and honest. So, the later part of his life was not so much a case of cheating on women, but dating around with women he liked and who liked him too. He was trying to juggle different women who wanted his attention and time, but it sometimes ended up badly, especially when some started to retaliate with extortion threats and blackmail for being “dumped.” Lisa Van Allen was one of the first, and she still continues on the same path. Yet, she was one of the many women Robert tried to save from an abusive situation. She ran to him claiming she was being abused by a man. Robert made the mistake of taking her in and having a relationship with this woman, who has shown signs over time of serious psychopathic and sociopathic tendencies.

She is also alleged to be the real woman on the famous tape (a charlatan called Sparkle, a disgruntled ex claimed was her 14-year-old niece). Lisa Van Allen looked identical to this woman’s niece when she was 18, when she allegedly made this tape with paid actors. She allegedly wanted to use it to extort Robert, which she did. Her ex-boyfriend claimed she paid actors to play Robert in order to extort Robert, an attempt that failed. That is the story told by her ex-boyfriend online. He did an interview claiming this much. He didn’t claim that it was her, but he did claim she plotted with actors. The actors themselves, whom he named, have been online boasting and laughing that “it wasn’t him in the video” (Robert). They thought it was funny that people believed it was him. Sadistically, they were satisfied with their level of public manipulation and the success of their work, creating this fake, deep child pornography which was being used for extortion and false allegations against Robert. These are not normal people the world is used to. When they see a woman like her on Surviving R. Kelly, presented well, they fall for the tears and the story without asking if the story made sense and what the evidence was, or without asking themselves if this woman is even well.

Most people never went back to check on these stories for updates before, during, and after the trial. It was during these times that ex-friends, family members, and others came forward online to expose them for blatant lies and public manipulation. They claimed the stories told were fake and they knew the people lied because they heard their plots to get to Robert in any way they could. Faith Rogers was one of those exposed, as were Jerhonda Pace and Azriel Clary. Halle Calhoun exposed herself as a liar through social media only days before changing her story with prosecutors, after meeting with disgruntled, rejected intern Azriel Clary. (They were photographed on social media collaborating and working out after Azriel Clary suddenly remembered that she was a new victim of abuse by him after all.) These new memories came many months after saying on video, full of infatuation towards Robert, that they all just wanted money and fame and were lying about him, but that she would clear his name on the right platform. Halle Calhoun, too, made a case for Robert through her own mother and intentionally playing his music on social media after people encouraged everyone to stop and cancel his music. She did it in clear support, bopping to it on Instagram.

This is where I come in, his real partner, only girlfriend, and true love of over six years. I messaged Azriel Clary before her fabricated stories of abuse, insisting that she stop lying to the public that she was his girlfriend. I stated that no matter what his corrupt attorneys did or said, she could not lie anymore because we would eventually go public. I emphasized that we were very much in love and had been monogamous the entire time. I explained that together, we sent her and Joycelyn Savage home, back to Florida, in May 2019, and ensured that they no longer received his financial support in any form. (I wanted to give her evidence of who I was by sharing some details that she thought only Robert knew. Eventually, Robert managed to cut them off entirely by the end of 2019 because I insisted for his safety and sanity. We also managed to get them out of his condo, where they were squatting while he was incarcerated, a place they did not live at all, despite his attorneys’ false claims that they did.) Now, a normal, healthy-minded woman at this point would have turned around and stopped. Maybe even apologized for what she did to me, his real girlfriend. But not Azriel Clary, who proved then to suffer from erotomania and delusions of grandeur linked to some kind of personality disorder. I would call it sociopathy and narcissism. She had to get revenge and blame everything on Robert all of a sudden. Revenge for the humiliation, shame, and false hopes of a relationship. She could not blame herself or her mother, who had planned the scheme before they met him. She blamed the person who kept telling her no and not giving his consent. Her mother clearly hoped that their daughter would succeed in seducing Robert as an intern (this is evident in her text messages before Azriel Clary met Robert to audition as an intern). She never succeeded, she never did “because he was never interested no matter what she tried” (Azriel Clary’s own words in letters to her parents that were read out at trial). How then did the prosecutors overlook this to falsely push a fabricated story that he slept with her around the time they met, when her letters were written much later on? Proving nothing happened at their meeting, after, or at all between them, not because of her, but because of his lack of any interest in her. He thought she just wanted to intern and get a job! He was tricked and scammed. I tried, at the time she started spewing abuse, to warn Robert about what I did. I felt it was the only way to free him from her family and the allegations. But I think he was still in some denial about how rotten Azriel Clary’s character was. We had communication issues throughout this, with limited time and access. People online, too, started meddling in the cases, making up stories about why Azriel Clary turned on him, stupidly concluding it was because of fake emails between Robert and Joycelyn Savage, written when he needed bond and Greenbourg had placed her on his motions as the person he was going to live with!

Can any of you imagine my horror, anger, and shock that he did this! That Robert, my partner, my boyfriend, would be forced, if approved by the courts, to live with the same scammer who started the whole mess, whose family were endlessly smearing him online as controlling her when she was the one controlling him because of the charges he was fighting. You will hear Robert insist in interviews that Joycelyn Savage was not on the indictments. He wanted to keep it that way! He thought, rightly, that if Joycelyn got a whiff of me, she was corrupt and weak enough to give in to her parents’ scams and also join in with the fake stories, which would leave him completely outnumbered by frauds. He hasn’t said this to me; he doesn’t have to. I know him better than anyone on this planet. I know his story better than anyone. I know his fears and how he navigates this world.

His attorneys put him in an inconceivable situation with no return. They are corrupt and deserve a lifetime in prison, at least 30 years, for not listening to either of us when we asked them to stop. They are criminals in my mind, too, and complicit. But the meddlers, too, are complicit in wasting Robert’s time with their delusions and interference. They were told directly by me to stop and listen, but they refused. They delude themselves into believing they are his heroes because he decided to eventually sue NY for the leaked emails. Part of Bonjean’s stupidity and pride is also not listening to me and “taking notes,” as she claimed she was doing with me.

Now, back to Aaliyah and the alleged fake romance with Robert. The evidence of his innocence is in the past. What people like me, all the way in Australia, knew about the story, his peers must have known too. I believe with my whole heart they are all lying, claiming that they knew something bad was going on. That people like Jay-Z knew but said nothing. These people are liars, frauds, and fake friends. Most of the men in the industry grew up jealous of Robert’s success, not just in music, but with women and with basketball, in everything he did. Plus, he has always been very handsome, attracting women of all races and backgrounds, everywhere. One celebrity woman said in an interview (I forget who), “every woman wanted Robert.”

For men, he is always competition, especially for those who lack the same achievements and success. Even men like Damon Dash, who later dated Aaliyah, never had Robert’s appeal to her, his fine looks, and amazing success. I believe with all my heart that Aaliyah had a crush on Robert. She had said in interviews that she had crushes on older R&B male stars from a young age. With Robert’s warm, fun, and loving personality, his all-American rugged masculinity, his sweet character, and his great strength, of course, so many women would have fallen for him, without his knowledge or awareness. Even Aaliyah, while coming of age, was not blind. This would have caused a lot of resentment that he was unable to manage and handle. No man can.

But he was so young when he entered the industry. He waited at least nine months for Barry Hankerson to help him with his career and sign him. Barry Hankerson was his boss, mentor in the industry, and even a father figure. You must remember that Robert was only 26 years old when the fake marriage happened. He may have been tall and strong-looking, but he was still a young man mentally and emotionally, who was naive, lacked experience, and lacked guidance. He never had a father and lost his mother quite young. He had to navigate a predatory industry on his own, using knowledge from his experience about who he could trust.

Before he was famous, Robert was very shy. He immersed himself in music because he was a prodigy and was taken under the wing of Lina M. (whom he called his second mother). Consequently, he lacked experience with women and friendships with men.

He has been very honest about being enamored by the instant attention of women that fame and performing brought. He lacked wisdom back then in how to navigate that attention and flattery as a young man. People exploited this. Women exploited this and exploited him far more than he ever could have with them, because he had the money, looks, and power. They mostly had nothing, but would stalk, chase, and hunt him down, studying his movements and character for years and months at a time, predatory all the way with their plots and schemes that he wasn’t aware of until it was too late. This has been proven by their online social media history, those of Joycelyn Savage and her family, for example, and those of Azriel Clary and her family. Some of these women used their families to present themselves as trustworthy. When their families were using them too for a meal ticket to riches and trying to push them into a situation where, had it been anyone else, they would have been abused, used, and exploited. But instead, Robert gave them all work and jobs where he could and spoiled everyone with lavish gifts and experiences on the road. It didn’t work with the Savage and Clary families because he never was interested in their daughters. Robert loved real women. He even told Azriel Clary point blank that she wasn’t mature enough for him. That should have been the end of it. The prosecutors again ignored these messages from him to her when she was trying to ask him for a relationship. When insane women are infatuated at the same time, it can end as it has, in a mess and trial of broken dreams, with tears and lies because of wasted years and schemes.

Back to the story of Aaliyah and him. The industry had to have known it was all fake because even at the time there was barely a whisper about it except that it was fake. The evidence in court revealed, through the testimony of people like Demetrius, who was his road manager and there, that Robert was not privy to any fake identification plans for Aaliyah. Again, the prosecutors wanted people to ignore this and focus on the marriage part and Robert’s age and fame (which they assumed gave him power back then). Robert was naive and never knew all the scheming and any illegal activity by others around him. Of course, they kept it from him. They wanted him to go through it for her. After all, in Robert’s mind, it wasn’t real and would be annulled straight away anyway. So, in his 26-year-old and inexperienced mind, he wasn’t aware that these people (in her camp; Barry Hankerson’s people) were serious and they needed the fake ID for Aaliyah to even participate. They did this all behind his back, all for her, forgetting and not caring about him at all.

The testimonies in court also revealed that they both left and went home to their separate homes after the fake wedding, which he annulled almost immediately. Again, where is guilt? Where is the predator? Where is the abuse? Where is the evidence of a sexual relationship? The prosecutors know they are corrupt, because you can’t know this and then push for conviction and 20+ years for an innocent man. These prosecutors and judges were psychopathic!

So why are so many people lying, except for self-gain in some form? Some of the people telling these fake stories were his rivals in music or romance. Some were women who were rejected and never had a chance. One was divorced by him. Some of these women were, how can I say this politely… not his type at all! But even a blind person could see that a man like him would never date a Jerhonda Pace, an Azriel Clary, or even a Joycelyn Savage (in real life). These women were shabby-looking, unkempt, mostly had poor hygiene according to family members, and had no life experience or any drop of intelligence, let alone talent. Som what good were they to him? (He was the one being used, especially when you know that he never went near these women). Of course, then people can assume that that is the reason he chose them, not knowing or caring that he never chose them or wanted them, even after their years of stalking, tricking, using fake IDs, and getting breast enhancements to appear older. He still said no to these women and plenty of others too. So these women now have to make up stories that he wanted them, that he desired them, that he preyed on them, had fantasies about them, not the other way around. According to their associates, they spent days, months, and years obsessing over him, hunting him down. All of them, without exception.

They felt resentment for his rejection of their fantasy and wanted revenge for being dumped or rejected.

Even his own daughter, Joann, who over time has been grossly manipulated by her mother, Drea Kelly, into lying and joining in, sang in a song with him that “mother was at war, maybe you’re not the enemy, she sang. The warring mother confusing her about who was right, she sang (The song is “I just wanna be there” on Robert’s Buffet album. A song about how much they loved each other as father and daughter, how they missed each other, how Drea Kelly being at war because of the divorce had hurt their closeness, caused pain and harm to their relationship, how she just wanted to be there for her father and he just wanted to be there for his daughter. This wasn’t made that long ago, released in 2015). Today, though, she tries to cover up for her mother endlessly, denies being manipulated and attempts to hide that her mother is plagued with jealousy and revenge, with a sick mind and wickedness. This is, in my view, the result of years of psychological abuse. Drea Kelly is one of the worst of the worst, in my view. Because she had children she was supposed to protect (not the other way around), raise to love God, love their father, and others above themselves. Instead, she raised and brainwashed them to only protect her, to love themselves more than their own father and others, even to be willing to destroy themselves just to protect her sickness and wickedness. She is the most manipulative woman I have ever encountered. Her most wicked deed was convincing her daughter that she, too, was abused and that her father was a monster, even though it was investigated at the time by two agencies and found to be false, and that he has no real history anywhere of child abuse, even with his other children, even with Joann. But Joann was the most susceptible to her mother because of their closeness and also the best target because Joann was her father’s first child, and they were once very close. So, what better way to get revenge against him for filing for divorce than to use her own daughter and her daughter’s fragility, susceptibility, and a father’s love for his children as a weapon of mass destruction?

She is possessed, demonic, and evil in my view, and no amount of charm in the world could convince me otherwise. But she is a very weak woman, a coward. I have tried to confront her openly. She doesn’t deny anything to me because she knows, as his real long-term partner, I know the truth of his real character: full of love, too much humility, a gentleman, always trying to save a woman in distress, even at a cost to himself. He will save others too, anyone who needs help; if he can, he will help. That’s his real character.

If he hadn’t had that one weakness in his youth—dating multiple women at the same time—they would have nothing to stand on. His character would be impeccable and flawless because he is the kindest, strongest, and most brilliant person I have ever known, outside of my father and family.

So we know that the industry is lying today about a real threat to Aaliyah that they missed back in 1994. They lie because they don’t want to become the new target or be accused of being complicit in abuse. It’s all to impress the public, win favor, and keep their royalties coming. But these people are snakes and gutter rats in fine clothes because they can’t tell the truth to save a life. They couldn’t tell the truth if they tried. If tomorrow they found out that the world found out that he was innocent all along, back would come their fake and fraudulent love and appreciation for him.

I am so happy that I never went into the industry when I was young. I am grateful that God gave me the wisdom to change lanes. Otherwise, I probably wouldn’t be helpful to the man I love.

They knew it was a fake relationship and marriage for her sake. It wasn’t a secret. If I knew at 17, all the way in Australia, they most definitely knew, being close to him. They never saw him with her or any underage person. The school story of him picking up girls is fake too. In 1994, 1995 and even before, we were all little groupies when it came to celebrities, some more than others, because we never had a chance to get close to any. So, if we saw them, we went crazy. It’s not the same today because social media has taken away the magic and mystery. Instead, people lean more towards hate. They fear, suspect, and smear celebrities they don’t know because they heard a story or two. It wasn’t the same in our time. Robert would have been flocked by women and teen girls no matter what he did or where he went. People pretend to have amnesia or hope that some of us will forget, that we are all weak and corrupt without the moral courage to tell the truth.

Aaliyah’s parents said there was never anything inappropriate between Robert and Aaliyah. Her mother even put it in writing that they were lying on “Surviving R. Kelly.” She stated that they were always with Aaliyah and would be the first to know if something ever happened because they are a close family. Demetrius, the only real living witness to the fake marriage, has flip-flopped between betrayal and defense, claiming Robert knew nothing. However, he still expresses his resentment that Robert fired him and wouldn’t listen to him. Yet, no one recognizes the resentment that led Demetrius to lie about Robert for a moment of fame he missed out on, only to then feel bad and try to recant. Not realizing it’s too late! Demetrius’ character is likened to that of Angelo Clary. Demetrius has been caught being inappropriate with underage women online and Angelo Clary has been caught obsessively liking and viewing incest porn between fathers and daughters. I saw these posts myself on Twitter and can’t believe these trained government prosecutors and investigators, who combed through Robert’s life to find nothing at all, missed all of this. They used these characters, all equally corrupt and wicked, as witnesses against a gentleman they could never know, just for a come-up. The NY team was so corrupt and malevolent, you would actually think and believe Robert did these things for real. Not that they needed to find the evidence once they had him held without bond. They came up short, so they used whatever rubbish person or fake evidence they found.

I will explain more of what they did to my love another day. But for now, I promised to answer the question: What is wrong with these images?

These are the images they use today to publicly convict my love of being a “predator” of her. Yet, these were taken around the time of her album release, the one she called “Age Ain’t Nothin’ But a Number.” They didn’t say anything then about anything. Do you know why? Because look at the images. They are intentionally set up to make them look intimately connected, with matching outfits, steering away from obvious fakery. But there is no intimacy at all, not even in their eyes. There is no exchange, no spirit of intimacy or attraction, there is no romantic love. Everybody knew that back then, that’s why no one cared, because she wasn’t exploited in any way. In fact, he was exploited, though, because she was a young woman who no one knew and no one would work with without him. After this campaign of marketing and serious abuse of Robert’s generosity, reputation, career, life, and goodness, she became “Aaliyah,” the princess of R&B. But after some years, when people’s attitudes changed and these “showmances” became morally accepted as wrong, people started then to look back with a different opinion, having sudden amnesia about what was going on in Hollywood and the industry. Fake romances were somehow gone and never existed.

Then #MeToo came, and people started looking at men as the predators of these women, forgetting history, real stories, and people’s true characters. The women had ulterior motives and could easily use men for a come-up or try to gain more power. They compared this situation to cases of real child marriage, where poor little girls and teenagers are forced to marry old or much older men. These people are deeply dishonest and intentionally evil if they compare this fake romance to the plight of little girls around the world. They show themselves for who they are when they do this, revealing that they don’t really care about real victims, especially children; they just want you to think they do.

Lady Juliet A.O