NEW YORK — R. Kelly compared himself to musician Jerry Lee Lewis — who notoriously married his 13-year-old cousin — and said there was nothing wrong with wanting to have sex with underage girls, an accuser testified Thursday.
Kelly’s shocking self-defense of his pedophilic instincts allegedly came in 1999 during a meal at Houston’s restaurant in Chicago with two friends and a 17-year-old girl named Stephanie.
“He mentioned that he likes young girls,” said Stephanie, now 39.
“Even look at Jerry Lee Lewis, he’s a genius and I’m a genius. We should be allowed to do whatever we want. Look at what we give to this world,” she remembered Kelly saying.
“It just came out of the blue,” she added.
Jerry Lee Lewis, a legendary rock and roll piano player best known for the hit song “Great Balls of Fire,” saw his career falter in 1958 after it emerged he’d married his teen cousin.
Stephanie is the third woman to testify in Brooklyn Federal Court that Kelly sexually abused her.
The “I Believe I Can Fly” singer is accused of heading an elaborate scheme that targeted underage girls and young women for illegal sex.
Stephanie first saw Kelly in 1998 at the Rock ‘N Roll McDonald's in Chicago when she was on a double date with her boyfriend. An associate of Kelly’s delivered his phone number on a slip of paper to her, she said.
She was just 16 years old.
She ran into him again a year later when he was signing autographs at a Nike store, she testified.
An innocent introduction quickly led into an abusive six-month relationship during which Kelly forced Stephanie to perform humiliating sex acts, she said.
“He would tell me to get undressed, then he would position my body,” she recalled.
Kelly would leave the room and tell her to be in the exact same position when he returned, she said.
Sometimes she would wait three hours. Kelly would get angry if she was not just as he left her when he returned, she testified.
“I would be completely naked ... just waiting for him to come have his way,” the woman said, near tears.
She told Kelly her age one of the first times they met, but it allegedly didn’t bother the R&B legend.
Prior to Stephanie’s testimony, a former Kelly employee said on the stand that the R&B singer was also a nightmare boss who fined workers for minor mistakes.
Tom Arnold, who worked as the “Sex Me” star’s studio manager from 2004 to 2011, described Kelly’s system of docking pay when employees messed up — and how it ultimately made him quit his job.
Once, the “Ignition” singer’ became irate when someone ate his donuts.
“We were all fined,” Arnold recalled.
The final straw came in October 2011, Arnold testified, when Kelly docked his full week’s salary for booking a male tour guide at Disney World.
“It needed to be a woman,” Arnold said.
The Disney World trip came together at the last minute, so Arnold had scrambled to book a tour guide.
“I took the first person I could get. It was a gentleman,” Arnold said.
When Kelly’s tour bus arrived at the theme park and the singer saw the male tour guide, he canceled the whole VIP experience, said Arnold, who is not to be confused with the actor of the same name who starred on the “Roseanne” TV sitcom.
Kelly docked Arnold $1,500, giving him his check for the week — $0.
That’s when Arnold said he finally quit.
“My wife wasn’t happy. I wasn’t happy. Rob wasn’t happy,” he said.
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