New R. Kelly Accuser Comes Forward With Claims of Physical and Sexual Abuse

Another woman has come forward with allegations of physical, sexual, and verbal abuse she received from R. Kelly in a Rolling Stone report published Monday. But where most previous accounts involve young women who were teenagers or in their early 20s at the time they began relationships with the singer, this one comes from Kitti Jones, a former Dallas radio DJ who is also a divorced mother of one.

A longtime R. Kelly fan, Jones met the singer at an industry event in 2011 and gave him her number. The two began dating and eventually she quit her job and moved to Chicago to live with him in his apartment in the Trump Towers. In what has become a familiar pattern in accounts from multiple other women who became involved with Kelly — including the young women whose parents allege that the singer is holding them in an “abusive cult” — over the next two years, Jones says, Kelly was verbally and physically abusive to her and other girlfriends and forced her to perform sex acts.

As soon as she moved in with him, Jones says, Kelly began to control virtually every aspect of her life. She was required to call him “daddy.” He demanded that she wear baggy sweatpants whenever she left the building and text frequent updates not only on her whereabouts, but also minor requests like going to the bathroom.

She said the first instance of physical abuse occurred within a month of her moving to Chicago. She confronted him about the video at the center of his child-pornography trial: She claimed he said “B—h, don’t you ever f—ing accuse me of something like that,” and kicked her and slapped her in the face. She says he physically abused her approximately 10 times in the first year and more frequently in the following year. She also said his behavior would abruptly become affectionate — for instance, when he was on tour “he treated me like a princess,” and incorporated her into a bawdy performance during his concerts.

After the tour, he moved her into his Chicago studio, which had living quarters, where two of his other girlfriends were also staying (the women were not allowed to share their real names). Cameras constantly monitored their movements and Kelly would punish them for leaving without permission, she said — either by taking away their phones for days or weeks at a time, or by withholding food, sometimes for as long as two and a half days. They were also not allowed to look at other men.

By 2013, she said he began to force her to have sex with other women, and in one instance urinated on two women while Jones and another woman were having sex with him.

“He videotapes everything that he does, and sometimes he’ll just make you watch what he’s done to other girls or girls that he had be together,” she said. “He would masturbate to that and then have you give him oral sex while he’s watching what he did with somebody else on his iPad.”

She said she contemplated suicide but ultimately managed to escape in September 2013 by saying she needed to return to Dallas to help her son, who had been living in Europe with his father, find a new school. She met with Kelly again two months later, on the premise of receiving some possessions she’d left behind, and said he assaulted her on his tour bus.

Despite the large number of similar allegations against Kelly over the past 20-plus years, the singer has never been convicted of any related crime. Presented with a list of Jones’ allegations, a rep for Kelly said: “Mr. Kelly is aware of the repeated and now evolving claims of [Jones]. It is unfortunate that Ms. Jones, after public statements to the contrary, is now attempting to portray a relationship history with Mr. Kelly as anything other than consensual involvement between two adults. As stated previously, Mr. Kelly does not control the decision-making or force the actions of any other human being, including Ms. Jones, by her own admission. Any claim of wrongdoing of any kind or of mistreatment of any woman by him is false, ill-motived and defamatory.”

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