Robert wished for Aaliyah only the best, and he meant that!
Song of Solomon 8:4
“Do not arouse or awaken love until it so desires.”
1 Corinthians 6:18–20
“Flee from sexual immorality… You are not your own; you were bought at a price. Therefore, honour God with your body.”
Most of you are so used to me beginning my posts with a piece of my mind, so that is how I will begin this one. I’m going to attempt to write a deeply respectful article that gives Aaliyah the proper respect and shares her thoughts honestly and thoughtfully. Understanding that Aaliyah had her own thoughts, her own mind, and her own opinions even at 16 years old. People were constantly shocked at her maturity. Don’t let her petite frame fool you. She was very intelligent, a good student, a young lady with a love for education and learning. But she had a creative side that she needed to express and dreams she needed to fulfil there. So she would not appreciate anybody trying to speak for her, especially if it falsely portrays her heart or her life for self-gain. Here I’m going to share her words and thoughts about Robert, what happened, and what people today have failed to uncover and share about her. Some who are intentionally focused on proving their own dark, deviant narrative about Robert, rather than uncovering the truth.
Firstly, let me say this as an introduction to this piece. There is one thing that deeply concerns me about Robert, one thing that keeps me up some nights with concern. It’s that Robert is one of the very few people on this planet who are deeply and divinely good. Deeply loving and truly Christian. This comes from a woman who has lived her life mostly dedicated to spiritual pursuits, who chose to walk a different path from Robert at a young age, choosing God and love over potential fame and fortune.
I have travelled and met thousands and thousands of people in my life. Even online, I encounter far more. But no one I have ever met has compared, in my view, to Robert’s sincere and genuine goodness and pure soul. This has been hidden behind many casual grown, female liaisons.
People are so disconnected from God that they forget that King Solomon was divinely blessed by God and was known as the wisest man in the Bible outside of Jesus. Yet he had a life at a time that mirrored Robert’s. But not just King Solomon. Many kings in the Bible did. But Solomon also gave us the Song of Songs, poetry for Christian married lovers, and the endless wisdom of Proverbs. Robert gave us modern-day “baby-making music” and, through those songs, deep wisdom and divine understanding about love and lovemaking. But that’s a story for another time.
I just want to point out that this is the very reason all of this happened to Robert, and he may have even unintentionally allowed it to happen for far too long. Robert is divinely good in a deeply beautiful, masculine and powerful way. In a way that is too rare these days, where every other person is narcissistic and unkind, judgmental and harsh, arrogant and critical, unforgiving and weakened by a desire for endless outside validation.
This is why you have never heard Aaliyah’s real story from him. Why, every time someone asked about her, rather than share private knowledge of her, he treated her with a respect that almost no one outside her own family does. The dissecting of her life, her story, and her intentions — putting words into her mouth and deciding what she would have wanted — is something Robert would never do to anyone, let alone someone who was as pure-hearted as Aaliyah was.
Firstly, you understand that Robert and Aaliyah’s relationship was genuine, but not at all what people have conjured up in their dark imaginations. They were close like older brother and sister. And a source from around that time shared this when someone questioned their closeness. They said that Robert was very protective of her, like an older brother. This should explain why he didn’t see the harm that would befall him in participating in a showmance relationship/marriage that would help Aaliyah’s career and give her respect in an industry that at the time only respected him. He was willing to sacrifice himself for her to grow and become Aaliyah that people love and celebrate today, calling her the Princess of RnB.
That was Robert’s divine gift, and I have seen Robert do this over and over again, secretly and silently. This is far from the story dark and deviant people have made up, and far from decisions most people would make. But you must understand the kind of man Robert is. You must be close enough to see and experience it first-hand, and few ever have that honour. He doesn’t think about himself when someone is genuinely in need. One could say that this is part of his Christian values. We are taught to lay down our lives for others as Christians. But Robert many times took it too far, and this is what keeps me awake sometimes.
The idea that the “War-Warrior” in his name (Kelly) and the wild in Sylvester meet far too regularly. But I wouldn’t change him for anything. Any woman who has ever loved a man who is heroic, valiant, a warrior, knows what I mean. Some men are born with this natural impulse to fight and win battles that others would die from at the beginning. That would crush others at the drop of a hat. Such men are rare diamonds that should be protected, respected, and emulated. But they are often misunderstood because others don’t have that same drive or intention and cannot comprehend the intentions of men like him.
I do believe this happened for a much grander, divine lesson for a world that has lost its appreciation for real justice, for real men, for due process and the presumption of innocence in the last 7 years. That Robert was chosen by God, in a way, because of his incredible warrior-like strength, but also his deep concern for all humanity.
When it came to Aaliyah, she was no exception. She needed his help, and she needed him to fulfil her dreams young and even immediately. When you think about how soon she was taken from this earth, if you see things from faith’s perspective, you would not change a single thing about her story or path before. Because if Robert had not sacrificed his honour and name and time for her, Aaliyah wouldn’t have made it to be a name that everyone knows and loves.
But behind the showmance is another story. It’s a story about Aaliyah’s values that she maintained and held long after the showmance. You see, almost everybody concluded falsely because there was a marriage certificate and because it was “R.Kelly” involved, that there must have been grooming and a sexual relationship involved, bad intentions or sexual intent. But I’m here to say that absolutely not. Jovante Cunningham was the woman on Surviving R. Kelly who made up this lie. God only knows what her dark and sinister intention was, but it must have awakened angels and maybe even Aaliyah herself to help me uncover Aaliyah’s own words that would dispel these lies once and for all.
In my early article, I outlined the real R. Kelly and Aaliyah story. The showmance. But I didn’t address this. Aaliyah grew up in a Catholic household. As someone who myself identifies as Catholic, I know that Catholicism runs deep. Catholicism isn’t a denomination; it’s the original Christian church for all Christians. In Catholicism, sacraments like marriage are taken seriously and are seen as sacred, which means that intimacy or sexual intimacy is also treated as sacred by committed Catholics. Aaliyah was taught abstinence before marriage and to wait until marriage for that.
I explained in my previous post how Robert and her after the showmance ceremony, both went to their own homes immediately after (this was testified to by a witness in court) and that Robert annulled it almost immediately. An annulment is supposed to be treated as if the marriage never existed. And that’s how Aaliyah saw it and Robert too, because it wasn’t a real marriage or romantic, intimate relationship. This is why, in all her interviews afterwards, she told people it wasn’t true and didn’t happen, to ignore the stories about it. It wasn’t because she was concealing abuse and was intimidated to speak the truth; it was because that was the reality. Those were her wishes.
The showmance didn’t have the effect either of them thought it would have. So it was buried as a harsh learning lesson.
Aaliyah’s abstinence and choice for this was shared in an interview with YM magazine in 1995, some time later. She said that abstinence was her preference and, “Heck yeah,” she was going to stay abstinent until she was married. This is because she was never intimate at all with Robert, and to her, the marriage wasn’t real. She was speaking about being intimate in the future, for the first time, with her husband. This completely destroys any false, dark, and evil narrative that Robert was grooming her, abusing her, or exploiting her in any impure way. It just did not happen, and Aaliyah said so in this interview.
She also addressed marriage in general in another interview, where she says, “When I get married…” So to Aaliyah, there was no marriage to Robert. It just wasn’t real, and that is how others should also see it.
Dame Dash also made false and defamatory statements, trying to speak for Aaliyah to the public without providing any proof that she said Robert was “a bad man,” when in reality, in an interview after 1994, she still spoke well of Robert. In another interview, when she and Robert were promoting her album, she dispelled any idea that there was a romantic relationship between her and Robert and simply said that they were close and called Robert “sweet,” saying that he would hate for her to say that about him. In that same interview, the interviewers mentioned a source who said that their relationship was pure and like an older brother and a younger sister.
I have added these interviews here for reference. They are not clear, but you can still read the word abstinence very clearly mentioned more than once, where Aaliyah says when asked about sex that her choice is abstinence. That is what she would recommend to young people because it would prevent unwanted pregnancies. She also talks about being at a time in her life where she was learning about love and romance for the first time, and how she knew others her age would be going through the same thing. She recommends that young people talk to their parents about sex and stay open with them about it.
All of these statements line up with what her mother, Diane, said when she denied Jovante Cunningham’s dark allegations of Aaliyah and Robert. How close she was to her daughter, and how she and her husband were always with her and never witnessed anything impure between them. Had these stories had substance, Aaliyah’s responses to these questions would be much different. She would not be speaking about learning about love and romance for the first time, of choosing abstinence until she was married, of recommending it for other young people or denying so strongly that she and Robert had any kind of intimate or romantic relationship.
I also read the contradictory comments made by Aaliyah’s father in that same interview, which did not help to clear up the confusion. On the one hand, he was clear that there was no relationship, no intimacy, no feelings, and no real marriage between them, no sexual anything going on between them. But on the other hand, he did not understand why Robert did not respond the same way he himself would have responded to the situation.
This has often confused people about Robert. His silence amidst horrible allegations. He offers love toward people even when they are long gone, even when they betray him most evilly. This is what I have meant by Robert’s genuine goodness, which is often misunderstood as a reaction to guilt, rather than the overcompensating spirit he sometimes has. Where he should hold grudges and place blame for his name being permanently ruined and his soul bruised by being exploited for being R. Kelly, he responds not with vicious anger or revenge, but instead, as the Bible says, to bless and not curse your enemies.
Not that Aaliyah was his enemy, but he was for sure the one most ruined by the marketing, production, and showmance that made her career.
People often think his loving reactions are a response to guilt, never understanding that his heart is more pure and untainted than most people’s. So when he thanked Aaliyah that year at the awards ceremony, even though he had stopped all contact with her, he was, in his own way, saying adieu to someone he had genuinely cared for — wanting her to know that, regardless, he had cared for her.
I know that most people would never do this or understand it. But we each have aspects of our character that only one or two people ever truly understand.
Also, because people have made so many evil and dark assumptions about Robert and his intentions toward women, particularly younger women, and because he has not denied it strongly enough to appease the public (though had he done more, people would have said it was due to guilt), anything he says and does is viewed through a lens that is already muddied because of the ongoing smear campaigns. Had he just disappeared and never mentioned Aaliyah again, he would have been accused for sure of being cold and using and exploiting her. Her father used the strong word “manipulation,” even after saying he bears no ill will and acknowledging that nothing untoward had happened, and in that, he confirmed that it was a showmance. He seemed to blame Robert for the certificate going public, not understanding that Robert had people like Demitrius Smith and other hidden enemies who were always jealous of him and out to ruin him any way they could. I believe this is what he was referencing — not the showmance ceremony itself.
This is the part of Robert’s story that needs real compassion and real understanding: how a young man of 26 like Robert could have been manipulated and exploited by people who used his name, image, and life to elevate another. How patterns unhealed repeat through the same characters until the lesson is learnt. How that one decision to go along instead of saying, “No, I won’t help,” or only so much, cost him being extorted, falsely accused of abuse, targeted by the same characters year after year and far more for the next 30 years. His childhood scars — living on the South Side of Chicago, being shot at 12 years old, and being abused as a young boy by an older girl of 15, then older women — expressed themselves in trying too hard to help others, not seeing danger where others would, especially with women, but most of all being exploited and used without realising it. Especially by women.
Because he was supposed to be the strong one, this is the confusing, convoluted psychology of male childhood victims of abuse by women. He didn’t grow up to become an abuser but a rescuer — a man already trying to be someone else’s hero at the expense of himself.
But Robert doesn’t seek pity, nor does he want to be called a victim. He is too healed, too whole, and too humble for that. There is a reason he has a tattoo that reads “Survivor” though, long before the word was exploited by charlatans in manufactured reality TV shows or documentaries. It’s because he truly is the survivor. He not only endured real childhood abuse by women, but he has also survived adult abuse by women and by the world, when people tried to project their evil, abusive characters onto him.
I’m going to leave it here. I hope to God that people will finally listen to Aaliyah and respect her voice. Both she and Robert deserve to not have their names dragged through social media year after year because of other people’s evil dissemination of what happened.
Fortunately, Aaliyah left a lot of interviews for people to watch and read if ever people are in doubt about her thoughts, wishes and actions. I pray that people read and listen to those instead of listening to people who have their own dark and greed-filled agendas. I speak about her uncle, Barry Hankerson, here, who tried to implicate his own sister and insinuate that the stories were true about Robert. People must know that for years her family have been fighting him for ownership and rights to her music catalogue.
As for Dame Dash, I can only think that deep jealousy and an envious spirit are there. That possibly Aaliyah still held Robert in high regard as she spoke publicly, and that made him jealous. I don’t want to point to allegations of control and Dame Dash controlling her that were floating around, now long forgotten. But I know that Aaliyah has never said a bad word against Robert publicly, and so anything anyone claims she said or thought should be ignored as slander because her own words should speak.
I hope this brings clarity and finally lays to rest the speculation, false assumptions, and unnecessary concern surrounding her and Robert’s relationship.
And if it does not, then I sincerely pray that God softens your heart — that He gives you a more humble spirit, one that seeks truth above repeated narratives about others.
Narcissism is a deeply harmful and unbecoming disorder, and sadly, it has become far too common in our world today.
May Aaliyah finally rest in peace, and may the world finally close this chapter of their story.
J.
Love Through Fire... 
Leave a comment