Early last Thursday morning, I received the latest in a series of calls from Dominique Gardner, a former girlfriend of R. Kelly, who said she was eager, when we met that night, to “give my truth.” For nine years, Gardner, who is twenty-seven, was one of Kelly’s lovers. For part of that time, she says, she was one of six women living with the singer. In the documentary series “Surviving R. Kelly,” Gardner appears in the final two episodes: we watch as her mother, Michelle Kramer, tracks her down to a Los Angeles hotel room and convinces her to leave the singer’s “cult.” Gardner told me that she has not watched any of these dramatic scenes, nor any part of the documentary. “What’s the point of seeing it when I lived it?” she said. “People are using it as entertainment, when it wasn’t entertainment for me, you know?”
After being reunited with her mother last May, Gardner returned to Kelly’s side three days later and stayed with him for about two more weeks, until she finally walked away for good. She is now living on the North Side of Chicago, working and saving money for a studio apartment of her own. “I would probably still be there if he would have let me go to my little brother’s graduation,” she said. “I’d still be there, but, when he told me no. . .I’m, like, ‘What is wrong with you?’ You don’t let people see their families, I guess, because we might realize how much freedom and happiness we have out there with our families.”
Family meant a lot to Gardner, who grew up in Chicago’s southwestern suburbs—she was especially close to her younger brother, and missing other family gatherings while she was with Kelly bothered her. She had always been a good student. Kramer wanted her to be a dental hygienist; Gardner aspires to be a writer and a poet.
Gardner looked healthier and happier than she did when we had last met, in July. At that point, she had left Kelly a month earlier, and was startlingly underweight. We had met in a bar in Chicago, where she spoke haltingly while looking out the big plate-glass windows, watching for any black S.U.V. that might stop and linger. “I wouldn’t put it past him to have his guys following me,” she’d said. On Thursday, as in the past, we started by talking about music—we are both big fans of Kendrick Lamar—and our tattoos; she said she admires how I am “all tatted up,” with the logos of more than a dozen of my favorite bands clearly visible on my forearms. Only one of her tattoos, a lion’s head, on the back of her right hand, can be readily seen, and I asked if she had others. She said that she also has two images of Kelly’s face, one on her left leg and another on her rib cage—a particularly painful place to get a tattoo, she noted.
For the final years of Gardner’s time dating Kelly, the group of women also living with him included Joycelyn Savage and Azriel Clary, who are still with the singer. Last week, Savage and Clary defended Kelly in an interview with Gayle King, on “CBS This Morning.” They told King that they love Kelly, and are living where they choose to live, but they also appeared scripted and defensive on camera. Later, King described how Kelly hovered in the background while Clary and Savage were interviewed; he coughed loudly at times, as if to remind the two women that he was within earshot.
One of my first questions for Gardner was if she regrets spending a third of her life with Kelly. No, she said. “I loved him to death, you know what I’m sayin’? But he needs help. Who doesn’t need help?” The word “cult” is one that Gardner rejects, and so is “brainwashed”—“I am not just about to spread lies about him,” she said—but she struggles to find a better way to describe a situation that, according to her, people don’t really understand, at least not the way she does. “I wouldn’t even say ‘mind games.’ It was just the fact that he tried to break me,” she said. “I couldn’t be broken. He wanted that control over me, and I wouldn’t give him that power. So, he figured, like, If I don’t give her food, she’ll come around. Nope. I’d rather die than come around and give you my soul.”
Keeping up with the news about Kelly in recent weeks has been dizzying. On February 21st, The New Yorker reported that the Department of Homeland Security is investigating him for sex trafficking and violations of the Mann Act. The next day, Kelly was indicted by the state of Illinois on ten counts of aggravated sexual abuse involving four victims, three of them minors. He spent three nights in jail before a woman who identified herself in court papers as “a friend” posted his hundred-thousand-dollar bond. On March 5th, King conducted an eighty-minute interview with Kelly at the Trump Tower in Chicago, where he now lives. Kelly spent the next three nights in jail for failing to pay a hundred and sixty-one thousand dollars in back child-support payments, until an anonymous donor paid the court. Kelly was released on Saturday night.
In the interview with King, Kelly became histrionic, crying, standing up, and directly addressing the cameras, which prompted an avalanche of Internet memes and the cold open on last week’s episode of “Saturday Night Live.” The singer insisted that he was innocent of all the charges and accusations against him, and he branded all the women speaking out against him as liars. “I’m not Lucifer. I’m a man,” he told King. “I make mistakes, but I’m not a devil. And by no means am I a monster.”
Although Gardner did not watch the full interview, she had seen that snippet. “That’s not genuine. That’s the devil talking,” she said. “Talking about ‘I’m not Lucifer.’ Yes, you are.” But she is clearly conflicted about Kelly; she also insisted that “he is a giver, because when everything between me and him was good—oh, my God, it was, like, perfect. But, as soon as he gets mad, he turns into a person like, oh, what up, the new Rob.”
“At the end of the day,” Gardner said, “I am not playing victim. I done did some sh*t.” Gardner said that she slept with two other men while she was one of Kelly’s girlfriends. “Maybe he did hurt. Maybe he was in love with me. But I never gave him a fair chance,” she said. The desire to convey her complex feelings about life with Kelly is what prompted Gardner to first e-mail me, in July of 2018, with the all-caps subject line “PRIVACY IS EVERYTHING!” We traded many texts and e-mails before she decided that it was time to meet again and tell her story publicly for the first time. Every time we talked, I asked her if she was in therapy. She was initially reluctant, but last Thursday she said she finally had her first session with a counsellor, in early March.
Gardner met Kelly in mid-2009, after a friend and fellow-“superfan,” Jerhonda Johnson, whom she’d met on MySpace, passed along his phone number. Johnson, now Jerhonda Pace, is one of the four victims in the current Illinois charges against Kelly; according to prosecutors, Pace had sexual contact with him starting at age sixteen. She broke the nondisclosure agreement that she signed with Kelly by talking to me, in August of 2017—part of the motivation, she said, was because she was concerned that Kelly was mistreating her friend Dominique.
In the summer of 2009, Gardner, who had just graduated from Hillcrest High School, enrolled to study dental hygiene, per her mother’s wishes. Gardner said that she first became intimate with Kelly at that time, when she was seventeen, the age of consent in Illinois. Kelly was then forty-two. Although she loved his music, Gardner said, “I was never starstruck with him, because I didn’t see the R. Kelly side—I saw the Robert side.” Gardner continued to live in her mother’s house for the first few years that she dated Kelly; Kramer did not approve, but Gardner saw the singer often, visiting him at the mansion that he owned in the Chicago suburb of Olympia Fields. On June 14, 2009, the police visited the mansion in search of Gardner, after her family had called them concerned that the teen-ager was there with Kelly. Gardner wasn’t there at the time—she was at a cousin’s house, she said. Police did not have a search warrant, and they left without taking any action. In 2015, Gardner quit school and began living with Kelly, whom she calls “a musical genius,” and five other steady girlfriends, in addition to other women who came and went. The women who lived with Kelly stayed in one of two homes he had rented in the Atlanta suburb of Johns Creek. “Atlanta is where he changed,” Gardner said. “It was like something switched. [Before that] I used to go home on a regular basis. I was able to call my family. Then, all of a sudden, it was no.”
