And that fact-particularly in light of the media industry’s structural weakening, debates about the value of arts criticism, and cultural attacks on journalism-makes Soulless even more striking. DeRogatis repeats, as if with incredulity, that no outlets followed up on the stories he broke, through public court records and a lot of knocking on doors, with any reporting of their own. Among them are record execs who feigned ignorance and lawyers who pushed Kelly’s early accusers to accept settlements in exchange for their silence. As much as Soulless is an account of Kelly’s misbehavior, it’s a finger firmly pointed in the direction of the people and institutions that enabled, and even encouraged, him. Also instructive is DeRogatis’ clear-eyed explanation of the many factors, including a biased judge and prosecutorial missteps, that led to Kelly’s acquittal in the face of damning testimony.īut in answering so many questions about Kelly, DeRogatis raises plenty more about what it all means.
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He is careful, too, in recalling his unusual proximity to the case: After an unknown person delivered incriminating footage to DeRogatis, he provided police with the video evidence that would launch the state’s messy 2002 case against Kelly he was compelled to testify at the trial six years later. He is careful to center the stories of his sources, and to contextualize their experiences. DeRogatis fills in the past 30 years with details about Kelly’s patterns of behavior, the lives of many of the girls and women he victimized, the publicity and management machine that kept him inoculated from material harm, and the slimy, equivocating justice system that failed its mandate so completely. Structured across three sections that roughly trace the evolution of the public’s view of Kelly, Soulless offers a dogged combination of biography, investigative reporting, and cultural criticism. The book is more than a straight-forward account of Kelly’s wrongdoing. Last week, a few days before the publication of Soulless, Cook County upped those charges to include 11 more felony charges of sexual assault and sexual abuse. Shortly afterwards, Kelly was indicted on 10 counts of aggravated sexual assault in Cook County, Illinois elsewhere, rumors of further investigations sprung up. Kelly,” a blockbuster, six-part docuseries produced by dream hampton and featuring interviews with dozens of people directly and indirectly aware of his behavior, made concrete the extent of Kelly’s alleged abuse, using DeRogatis’s reporting as something of a roadmap. The January airing of Lifetime’s “ Surviving R. These days, the Kelly matter is pretty much closed in the eyes of the public. Nobody.” That assessment felt like a truism, and it gave the allegations the kind of public framing that actually sticks. It also helped, I think, that Hopper emphasized a specific phrase of DeRogatis’ (which, he admits, he didn’t originate): “The saddest fact I’ve learned is nobody matters less to our society than young black women. Kelly in the age of social media.” Is that why people were finally paying attention, he wondered? Partly yes. Kelly’s Many Crimes?,” DeRogatis described the Hopper interview as “a one-stop shop for the truth about R. The next month, in a Village Voice piece of his own, titled “Why Are People Finally Paying Attention to R. But in a matter of weeks, that momentum had slowed. Kelly, headlining Pitchfork Music Festival, playing Bonnaroo and Coachella, and collaborating with Lady Gaga. Kelly had had something of a year, DeRogatis explains in his new book Soulless: The Case Against R. The piece wasn’t the first time any of the rape and predation allegations against Kelly were made public, but it was the first time they went viral. An interview he’d given to Jessica Hopper was published in the Village Voice that December, alongside disturbing details from his work in the Chicago Sun-Times over the years. Kelly’s alleged crimes against girls and women, he began to sense that something had finally clicked with a mass of readers. In 2013, nearly 15 years after Chicago journalist Jim DeRogatis and his partner Abdon Pallasch first began reporting on R.