‘Everyone failed these young, Black girls’: journalist Jim DeRogatis on his decades-long battle to expose R Kelly

Self-described ‘fat rock critic’ Jim DeRogatis: ‘Where was Rolling Stone? Where was the Chicago Tribune?’ Photograph: Carolina Sanchez/The Guardian

It all began with the bodyguards, and the balled-up pieces of paper. So many pieces of balled-up paper. The bodyguards pressed them into the hands of teenage athletes and aspiring singers and girls on their way home from prom. They kept slipping them into warm, young hands even after their boss, the R&B artist R Kelly, had been indicted for producing child abuse images in 2002, and acquitted in 2008.

On the paper was R Kelly’s phone number. The underage teenage girls would contact Kelly in the hope he would help them in their careers, or because they liked his music, or even just out of youthful curiosity: would he text back? None had any clue of the horror that would unfold. Kelly raped and sexually abused dozens of them. He forced them to live according to degrading restrictions, inflicted physical violence upon them, and even, if reports are to be believed, forced them to eat faeces if they displeased him.