R. Kelly vehemently denied molesting underage girls and women in an explosive interview with Gayle King which aired Wednesday, March 6, on CBS This Morning. The troubled singer was charged with 10 counts of aggravated sexual abuse of three underage girls and an adult woman last month.
The interview with King was his first since his arrest. Kelly fought back tears and yelled as King insisted that his past is relevant to his current charges with underage girls.
“Absolutely no, it’s not. Because, for one, I beat my case,” Kelly said emphatically.
The 52-year-old R&B crooner was referring to his acquittal on child porn charges in a 2008 case involving a 14-year-old girl.
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Lawyer Michael Avenatti turned over a videotape to authorities which he says showed the singer engaging in sexual contact with a 14-year-old girl. But Kelly’s people insist the underage girl in the 2nd video is the same girl in the case for which he was acquitted in 2008.
“When you beat your case, you beat your case. They can’t double jeopardy me like that,” Kelly told King.
Getting up from his chair, Kelly yelled, “Y’all killing me with this sh*t! I gave you 30 years of my f**king career!”
He continued: “Thirty years of my career! And y’all trying to kill me? You killing me, man! This is not about music! I’m trying to have a relationship with my kids! And I can’t do it! Y’all just don’t want to believe the truth! You don’t want to believe it!”
Kelly turned to the camera and said, “Quit playing. Y’all quit playing. I didn’t do this stuff! This is not me. I am fighting for my f—ing life!”
King asked R. Kelly if he thought there was a problem with him having girlfriends who were much younger than him, to which the singer replied, “I don’t look at ‘much younger than me.’ I just look at ‘legal.'”
He added, “I’m an older man that love all women.”
Kelly said the parents of one of his girlfriends turned her over to him in exchange for money. Azriel Clary was just 17 when they met.
He denied having a sexual relationship with Clary while she was a teenager.
“Absolutely not,” he said. “Although her parents wanted me to.”
He said her parents were money hungry opportunists.
“What kind of father, what kind of mother, would sell their daughter to a man? How come it was ok for me to see them until they weren’t getting no money from it?”
Kelly is currently out on $1 million bond. He lives with Clary and another of his girlfriends, Joycelyn Savage, in a $2 million Trump Tower apartment in Chicago.
