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Former Dallas DJ Tells Harrowing Story of R. Kelly Abuse in Rolling Stone

Kitti Jones says she met the R&B singer at a 97.9 The Beat after-party in Mansfield.
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Before Harvey Weinstein, there was R. Kelly. Or rather, there was and still is R. Kelly. While Weinstein has been voted out of the Academy and into sex rehab, R. Kelly is still touring—he performed in Dallas as recently as March at the Gas Monkey Bar & Grill—despite decades of underage sex allegations and most recently a BuzzFeed article alleging the performer was keeping several young women as sex slaves in his home and studio.

In a new Rolling Stone article, one-time Dallas DJ Kitti Jones gives her account of a two-year relationship with the singer that began after his June 2011 show at Verizon Theatre. From early in the story:

Surprisingly, Jones – a popular DJ for Dallas hip-hop and R&B station 97.9 The Beat – wasn’t in the audience. She’d been into Kelly since she was a teen in the early 1990s, when she’d hide in her room with his music to escape her mother’s tumultuous romantic relationships. She’d buy every magazine he was in and, upon the release of his 1993 solo debut, 12 Play, took a limo to a third-row seat at her first Kelly show. She’d seen him in concert seven times since. “He was my Brad Pitt,” she says.

But even though she was disappointed to miss it, bailing on the concert meant something better: she was at Fat Daddy’s, a club in suburban Mansfield, Texas, setting up for the Beat-sponsored after-party. She was finally going to meet the man she’d been captivated by for more than 20 years.

By November of that year Jones had sold her car and moved to Chicago to live with Kelly at his request, leaving her career in Dallas behind. What followed, she describes, was nearly two years of emotional, physical, and sexual abuse, including being kept as something of a prisoner inside Kelly’s Chicago music studio. An excerpt about that time:

Two months into living at the studio, Jones says, Kelly began using starvation on her as punishment for not following his orders. Jones says the longest she went without food was two and a half days, though single days without a meal were not uncommon. “Will u send a pizza here to studio I’m alone til 4am no card no money just dropped off with my blanket and the guys aren’t replying,” Jones texted childhood friend LaToya Howard on May 23rd, 2013, at 12:35 a.m. “I feel dizzy.” ([Veda] Loca, who worked with Jones at The Beat, tells Rolling Stone that she noticed Jones’ drastic weight loss after Jones broke up with Kelly and said Jones told her she had sometimes not been allowed to eat.)

Jones also describes many instances of sexual abuse, in which she was forced to perform sex acts with Kelly’s other girlfriends or women he flew in. Shame, it seems, kept her from leaving until September of 2013, when she finally escaped after telling Kelly she wanted to take her child back-to-school shopping (Jones’ son lived with her ex-husband). As the article says, she “flew to Dallas with two suitcases and never returned.”

According to LinkedIn, Jones now lives in San Diego, and tells Rolling Stone that she hopes to start an organization called Stop Protecting Your Abuser. To read the entirety of Jones’ story, click here.

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