R&B superstar R. Kelly had already been the target of several lawsuits alleging sexual misconduct when he told his then-business manager in December 2000 that police were harassing his teenage goddaughter about whether they’d been having an inappropriate relationship.
The business manager, Derrel McDavid, told a federal jury Wednesday that when he asked if the allegation regarding the girl was true, the singer exploded.
“‘Are you out your goddamn mind?'” Kelly said according to McDavid, who puffed out his chest and spoke loudly for effect. “‘This is my goddaughter! Of course there’s no truth to this.'”
McDavid said Kelly was convinced that the girl’s aunt, Stephanie “Sparkle” Edwards, and his former personal manager, Barry Hankerson, who each had axes to grind against Kelly, were behind it. Police later interviewed the goddaughter, “Jane,” and her family, who denied it all, he said.
Even after rumors surfaced a year later about a videotape depicting Kelly sexually abusing Jane, McDavid said he believed the singer.
McDavid, who is charged with participating in a wide-ranging cover-up scheme to bury evidence of Kelly sexually abusing underage girls, took the witness stand on the 15th day of trial at the Dirksen U.S. Courthouse. His defense hinges in part on his claim that he truly believed Kelly to be innocent at the time of the alleged cover-up, and that he merely followed the advice of more experienced attorneys and investigators.
It’s a rare and risky move for a criminal defendant in federal court, and prosecutors are expected to cross-examine McDavid at length on Thursday.
Jurors have already heard from Kelly’s goddaughter, who testified under the pseudonym Jane, that Kelly had sexual contact with her “innumerable” times beginning when she was just 14, then pressured her to lie about it. And they’ve seen excerpts from videos that McDavid allegedly conspired to recover before they wound up in the hands of law enforcement, including one where Kelly allegedly instructs Jane to refer to her “14-year-old” genitalia.
But on questioning from his own attorney Wednesday, McDavid painted a different picture. Dressed in a gray suit and light blue tie, McDavid, 61, was conversational and animated on direct examination, offering slight smiles and sometimes heavy sighs while describing the excitement and frustration of managing Kelly’s meteoric rise.
At one point, when describing how Kelly was a rare “self-contained” star who could do it all, McDavid gestured toward Kelly across the room, saying he could “sit right there at that table and produce a song.”
McDavid said he also saw a darker side to Kelly’s fame. Once the money started rolling in, McDavid said, Kelly was besieged by lying young women who were out for a payday and bitter former associates like Edwards and Hankerson. That’s why he didn’t believe it when rumors surfaced that Kelly was abusing his teenage goddaughter, he said
“Every statement, every report, every lawyer’s letter, all said the same thing: She denied it. Her parents denied it,” he said. Asked what impact that had on Kelly’s strenuous denials, McDavid paused.
“I believed him,” McDavid said.
The idea that bad actors were shaking down Kelly was reinforced in 2001 when a Kansas City man, Charles Freeman, reached out to Kelly’s entertainment attorney, Gerald Margolis, demanding money in exchange for returning a purported sex tape, McDavid said.
Freeman previously testified that McDavid offered a million dollars for the return of the tape, which prosecutors allege contained graphic scenes of Kelly sexually abusing Jane. Freeman also said McDavid was present at meetings in Kansas City where he was issued polygraph tests to determine if he’d made copies.
McDavid described Freeman, a former merchandiser for Kelly, as a “low-level T-shirt guy” and street criminal who couldn’t be trusted.
When asked if Kelly’s team would have hired Freeman to seek out a videotape, as Freeman has testified the arrangement occurred, McDavid shook his head and scowled.
“I wouldn’t have hired him to shine my shoes,” McDavid said, his brow furrowed. “He was just a bad person with a bad vibe.”
McDavid said Margolis hired famed private investigator Jack Palladino to investigate and ultimately pay Freeman $140,000 for the return of the tape and any copies. McDavid flatly denied ever offering $1 million to Freeman, and said he was not even in Kansas City when Freeman said they’d met.
McDavid said Palladino called him in the middle of the night in August 2001 to tell him the tape had been obtained from Freeman. It appeared to be a recording of Kelly and an unknown woman, not a minor.
“He said the tape was a copy,” McDavid testified. “He could make out Mr. Kelly. The tape was of very poor quality. He couldn’t tell who the woman on the tape was.”
McDavid said he later became aware of lots of other sex tapes with Kelly on them, including one depicting the singer and his wife, another featuring one of his backup dancers, and a third that showed Kelly with a famous baseball player’s wife.
“Then there were some other tapes that were supposed to be fakes,” McDavid testified.
But it wasn’t until December 2001 that the first rumor began circulating about a tape that showed Kelly and Jane, McDavid said. He said he knew Jane as Kelly’s goddaughter and had seen her at Kelly’s Near West Side recording studio. McDavid said that before the rumors of the tape surfaced, Kelly had asked him to arrange the purchase of a used PT Cruiser for Jane for her 16th birthday.
McDavid said Kelly was “pissed off” about the situation because he “couldn’t believe anybody would make up this kind of a rumor about his goddaughter.” When McDavid asked him if it was true, Kelly again reacted in anger.
“F— you. This is my goddaughter,” McDavid quoted Kelly as saying. “Don’t ever question me about this again.”
But others in Kelly’s camp went into crisis mode. When told of the rumor about Jane, Margolis said Kelly should meet with her parents to get ahead of the situation before it hit the media, according to McDavid’s testimony. Margolis also advised Kelly to hire a criminal defense lawyer, he said.
“Now there was a particular issue about a specific person who was underage on a tape,” McDavid said. “We had to take that seriously. Enough was enough.”
McDavid said he set up the meeting with Kelly and Jane and her family in a hotel in Oak Park. On the drive there, Kelly was “slightly apprehensive” and angry about the situation, McDavid said.
“He was concerned about the family being hurt by the media,” McDavid told the jury.
Jane testified last month that she went with her parents to the hotel, where Kelly spoke privately with her father. After a while, her father stormed away furious, and told her mother “it was true” about their relationship.
Kelly followed behind, “begging for his forgiveness and saying not to turn on him,” Jane testified. The singer dropped to his knees, grabbed his head and apologized profusely, Jane said.
Jane said she could not remember whether McDavid was present for the meeting.
In his direct testimony, McDavid said he waited in the car. Afterward, Kelly seemed relieved, saying he’d spoken to Jane’s father and “told him the situation” and that the father had “understood.”
Kelly never told McDavid that he’d gave any kind of “confession” at the meeting, McDavid said.
McDavid’s belief that the allegations against Kelly were orchestrated stemmed from the very first public claim against Kelly, he said, which came from Tiffany Hawkins in the late 1990s. Hawkins sued Kelly, accusing him of having sexual contact with her when she was underage, and Kelly ultimately settled the suit for $250,000.
But, McDavid said, Hawkins’ original claim alleged that he had impregnated her — which Kelly strenuously denied, saying he would take a paternity test. That claim was later dropped, which made McDavid suspicious that she was not being truthful, he testified.
Kelly’s attorney at the time, Margolis, said he would prove her a liar but that they would still settle, which McDavid found confusing. But “this is the way it goes,” Margolis told him, according to McDavid.
McDavid scrunched his face in apparent disgust as he talked about women making stories up for “a payday,” at one point exhaling sharply and shaking his head as he described Hawkins in particular as “on some kind of bulls–t.”
But before jurors were brought in Wednesday morning, Judge Harry Leinenweber ruled on a hot-button request involving journalist Jim DeRogatis, a former Chicago Sun-Times critic who was anonymously mailed a copy of a videotape allegedly showing Kelly with Jane, leading to the singer’s indictment on child pornography charges in Cook County in 2002.
McDavid’s attorneys said they wanted to call DeRogatis strictly to cast doubt on the chain of custody for one of the tapes at issue — not to ask him about confidential sources or any other tricky topics. But Leinenweber had already ruled weeks ago that chain-of-custody issues were not relevant, and so there was no basis to call DeRogatis to testify, the judge said.
On Tuesday, the eve of McDavid’s expected testimony, Kelly’s defense attorneys also filed paperwork asking the judge to prohibit McDavid from testifying about certain topics that they fear could unfairly prejudice the jury against Kelly — including any testimony “related to McDavid taking Kelly to get injections or any treatment to curb his sexual appetite.”
The judge said he would rule on those issues as they came up in McDavid’s questioning.
McDavid, a certified public accountant, began his more than four hours on the witness stand Wednesday by telling jurors about his first encounter with Kelly, long before he became a superstar.
He first heard about Kelly in the 1980s, when a high school friend from Kenwood Academy walked into a card game and said he had just signed a group called R. Kelly and Public Announcement.
“He was positive that R. Kelly was going to be a big player in the music industry,” McDavid said, swiveling in his chair and sometimes pausing to sip from a bottle of water.
A few years later, McDavid met with Kelly about becoming his accountant.
“The first words out of Robert’s mouth was, ‘Have you heard my music?’ And I said, ‘No, I haven’t.’ He kind of looked down on the floor like he was a little bit disappointed,” McDavid said.
At that time, Kelly was introverted and “humble,” McDavid said. “He was just trying to get in the music business and make it.”
But he warmed to McDavid during their first meeting, he testified, eventually asking: “So you the guy who’s gonna handle my money?”
“I said yes,” McDavid said. “He smiled. That was the extent of our conversation.”
In the years to come Kelly became a bona fide superstar, McDavid said, and became “self-contained” — that is, he could write, play instruments and produce, he said.
McDavid recalled listening to a country music radio station with his wife, and in the middle of the country music, a song from Kelly’s debut solo album “12Play” came on.
“On a country station!” McDavid said. “I glanced over to my wife and said, ‘Looks like he’s made it.'”
