NEW YORK — R. Kelly told one of his victims that her parents sold her to him for drugs, she testified Tuesday.
“He confided in me that a previous manager named Mase had given my parents a few bricks in exchange for me,” she said at Kelly’s sex trafficking trial in Brooklyn federal court.
The testimony came as the woman, whom the Daily News is referring to as Jane, explained how Kelly would make his live-in girlfriends feel as if their families did not care about them.
“He would say that we were worthless, that we did not mean anything to them,” she said.
The victim continued her testimony from Monday, detailing her physical, emotional and sexual abuse at the hands of Kelly.
She testified that toward the end of her relationship with Kelly, she did an interview with Gayle King on CBS in March 2019 to defend Kelly. But the woman admitted she was lying during the viral interview, she said.
She went on the CBS show with another Kelly girlfriend and described her relationship with him as healthy.
“Were you being truthful when you spoke to Gayle King?” asked Assistant U.S. Attorney Maria Cruz Melendez.
“I was not,” the woman, now 23, responded.
She also noted that Kelly, born Robert Sylvester Kelly, 54, was present in the room and did a distinctive cough to remind his two girlfriends of his presence.
The interview came just months after the Lifetime documentary “Surviving R. Kelly” was released and months before the “I Believe I Can Fly” singer was slapped with federal charges in Chicago and New York.
She recalled on the stand how Kelly told her and another alleged victim, Joy, that there was a documentary coming out about him in 2019.
“Everything was false,” she remembered Kelly telling her about the forthcoming documentary series. He also told the two women to switch the channel if the documentary ever came on.
The show came out toward the end of Kelly’s relationship with Jane, who was one of his last supportive live-in girlfriends.
She left the singer in October 2019 and began speaking with federal prosecutors in January 2020, she testified.
She detailed how the abusive relationship devolved into daily spankings, which Kelly called “chastisings,” after which she was forced to write letters to the allegedly illiterate singer profusely apologizing, she said.
“The defendant saw chastising as teaching,” she said. “It was to help me ... remember the way to act and be.”
But in her apology letters, the woman sometimes pushed back against the way Kelly treated her.
“Your pride and ego is involved,” she wrote in one undated letter. “As long as I’m still apologizing and accepting my chastising you should be happy. ... I’m not going to get spankings over and over because my apology isn’t up to your standards.”
She had to write letters like that every two to three days, she testified.
The woman also detailed how Kelly would force her, as punishment, to have sex with one of his male victims, known as “Nephew.”
“He said that he had been grooming Nephew since he was young like me,” said the woman, who met Kelly and began having a sexual relationship with him when she was 17 in Orlando.
On cross-examination, Kelly's lawyer Deveraux Cannick suggested that the girl’s parents were trying to get her close to Kelly so they could benefit financially.
Jane admitted under questioning that her parents sought to get Kelly to “endorse a bluetooth dildo” that would synch to Kelly’s music while in use.
“He actually told them to give him a proper proposal,” Jane testified, admitting that in private, Kelly rejected the idea.
“He just said it was not something he could ever do,” she said.
Kelly, whose trial began last week, is accused of trafficking women and girls for illegal sexual activity.
The singer is also accused of knowingly giving herpes to some of his victims, which is a crime in some states.
