According to the indictment, R. Kelly’s criminal racketeering centered on the sexual exploitation of five “Jane Doe” victims, including the transportation of women and girls across state lines to engage in illegal sexual activity
Photo: KAMIL KRZACZYNSKI/AFP via Getty Images Jury selection begins today in the New York case against R. Kelly, who is facing more than 20 years in prison if convicted. Federal prosecutors allege that the singer engaged in a decades-long pattern of preying on young women and girls for the purpose of coercing sex.
A finding of credibility encompasses not simply a belief that the abuse happened, but also the belief that it matters. Just as determinations about trustworthiness are meted out in ways that correspond to social power, so too is our care distributed unevenly and predictably: The suffering of an abuser who could face accountability for his misdeeds matters far more than the suffering of his victim. I call it the care gap.
The protection of rape law has long been withheld from the most vulnerable victims. This overlook is an offshoot, and a driver, of the care gap. When Black women were slaves, their rape — whether by white masters or by Black men — was lawful. In keeping with this approach, when the Mississippi Supreme Court dismissed charges against a male slave in 1859, it made clear that the rape of a young Black girl was not a crime.
Kelly’s alleged abuse was well-known in certain circles for decades. In his book Soulless, music critic Jim DeRogatis identifies 48 victims of Kelly’s abuse. “Just as disturbing,” DeRogatis writes, “I put the number of people who knew about or witnessed that damage in the thousands.” Among them, DeRogatis mentions employees of record studios and labels, radio stations, magazines, newspapers, hotels, restaurants, high-end gyms, and nightclubs.
As R. Kelly’s trial unfolds, we can expect to see powerful evidence of how the credibility complex harms some victims more than others. Most notably, Black girls and women are at an extreme disadvantage when their worth is stacked against their abusers’. “No one particularly cares that they are being abused,” writes Moya Bailey, a feminist and critical race studies scholar who coined the term “misogynoir.
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