Witness says R. Kelly would ‘flip’ and become ‘super sexually hyper’

BROOKLYN (CN) — Suzette Mayweather heard “laughing, screaming, thumping” coming from upstairs at R. Kelly’s music studio in Chicago. Female voices. She didn’t know what was happening, but the indicted R&B singer would soon explain. 

Kelly, 54, told Mayweather, one of his assistants, that he was upset at how his girlfriends were behaving during a birthday party. He decided to discipline them by directing them to fight each other, Mayweather testified on Tuesday. 

“He didn’t like the dancing, when they were twerking for cake,” she said. 

Previous alleged victims testified that Kelly would physically abuse them, including hitting them with his size 12 Air Force 1 sneakers and spanking them so hard he would break their skin. Mayweather recalled one of Kelly’s girlfriends waking her up in the middle of the night, saying Kelly had slapped and spanked her, and showing bruises on her backside. 

Kelly, whose full name is Robert Sylvester Kelly, faces racketeering and Mann Act charges in the Eastern District of New York stemming from an alleged decades-long sex ring that included minor victims. 

Mayweather’s testimony matched previous accounts from Kelly’s former employees, who discussed strict “protocols” that Kelly’s girlfriends had to obey. They were allegedly required to stay in their designated rooms, wear baggy clothing, and were not allowed to speak to other men. In elevators, they faced the walls. At basketball games, they cheered only for Kelly. 

Kelly would physically or sexually abuse his girlfriends when they failed to obey, according to witness accounts. One alleged victim, Jane, said she was punished by having to have sex with a man she’d never met. Others said they were denied food for days. 

Text messages between Mayweather and her twin, who also worked for Kelly, showed her questioning some of those rules when an alleged victim, Jane, was kept in the back room of Kelly’s Chicago music studio for more than a day. 

“So he’s had her in there all day? Has she come out to use the bathroom or eat?” Mayweather wrote. “Why is he holding her there?” 

At times, Mayweather, who knew Kelly from the same social circles in Chicago for years before she began working for him in October of 2015, pushed back. 

Though she said she knew it was forbidden, she once allowed one of Kelly’s girlfriends, Dominique, to leave the Mercedes-Benz Sprinter they frequently traveled in for tours so that she could get food. 

Mayweather said she also talked about personal matters with Dominique, including her aspirations to become a writer, and her relationship with Kelly. When the singer learned about those conversations, he fumed, Mayweather said as the broke down in tears for the first and only time during her testimony.  

“It was the first time that I had ever seen Rob really upset,” Mayweather said. “It wasn’t the tone. It was the look in his eyes.” 

“I feared for [Dominique] in terms of what the repercussions would be,” Mayweather said. 

When Mayweather broke the rules, she was sometimes fined $500, and had to write apology letters to Kelly — a requirement he is said to have also had of his girlfriends. 

Once, around 2 a.m., Kelly ordered Mayweather to bring him a sweet potato pie. She googled a 24-hour Walmart, confirmed it sold Patti LaBelle brand pies, and took an Uber there. 

“I purchased all of the Patti LaBelle sweet potato pies,” Mayweather recalled. When she returned to the studio, she said to Kelly, “you thought I was going to fail your test.” 

Later on Tuesday, a woman named Faith took the stand as Kelly’s sixth accuser to testify at his trial, which is now it its third week. She described meeting Kelly in March of 2017, when she was 19 years old, and later traveling to see him in New York, Dallas and Los Angeles. 

“I got to see a compassionate side of him, an emotional side. He wasn’t always bad, he wasn’t always mean,” Faith said. 

“There was times when he would flip,” however, and go from “extremely calm” to “super sexually hyper," she said.

Faith described Kelly pressuring her to have sex and said the singer never wore a condom or told her that he had herpes — despite taking medication for the virus starting in the early 2000s, according to previous testimony from his physician. Kelly’s charges include knowingly transmitting herpes to his sexual partners. 

The first time Kelly and Faith had sex was at a hotel in Long Island, when he came to her room around 6 a.m. and undressed, instructed her to do the same, and then put her hand on his crotch. She said he told her what to say during sex — “I like it Daddy” — and later criticized her, saying she had “a lot to learn” about sex and being in a relationship with him. 

Kelly said that “anything he told me was just constructive criticism to make me better, to make me more of a woman,” Faith testified. 

Her testimony will continue on Wednesday.

Follow Nina Pullano on Twitter

Follow @NinaPullano

Subscribe to Closing Arguments

Sign up for new weekly newsletter Closing Arguments to get the latest about ongoing trials, major litigation and hot cases and rulings in courthouses around the U.S. and the world.

Email *

Submit