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In addition to the eight women who allege they were abused by R. Kelly in Lifetime’s new doc about the singer, the brothers of the hitmaker are also speaking out in “Surviving R. Kelly,” about claims that he has been abusing young girls for decades.
In the doc, Bruce and Carey Kelly recall their famous sibling as being a “mild-mannered,” “afraid” and “timid” kid while they grew up together in Chicago’s Altgeld Gardens housing projects,
Bruce, who is Kelly’s older brother and currently incarcerated at Chicago’s Cook County Jail, also said “Rob was shy and very timid. If you stared at him in his face he would cry.”
In his interview, Carey detailed how the R&B crooner had problems reading and writing when he was a kid and he was bullied for it.
Fast forward to 2016 when Kelly revealed to GQ that the was sexually abused by a relative from age 7/8 ’til he was about 14 or 15.
“It teaches you to definitely be sexual earlier than you should have, than you’re supposed to,” he said. “You know, no different than putting a loaded gun in a kid’s hand — he gonna grow up being a shooter, probably. I think it affects you tremendously when that happens at an early age. To be more hornier. Your hormones are up more than they would normally be. Mine was.”
Carey said he believed R. Kelly’s abuse confession because it also happened to him.
“I was molested by a family member and that shook my world,” Carey said. “I knew it wasn’t right even though I was 6 at the time. I was afraid to tell my mom. Robert, being my big brother — I brought that to him and told him what happened to me. And when I told him he didn’t really respond to it like I thought he should. He said, ‘Naw, that didn’t happen to you.’ I said, ‘Yes it did.’ He said, ‘No it didn’t.’ I left it at that.”
The brothers say there were pretty shocked when R. Kelly married Andrea Kelly in 1996 because “It just looked to me that they weren’t compatible,” he said. “She just seemed different than what he was accustomed to having.”
Andrea and R. Kelly were married until 2009 and have three children together. Last year, she came forward with her own tale of abuse at the hands of her ex-husband.
“After the marriage she got real quiet. She was really quiet, and I think that’s how Robert wanted it.”
Read more here.
“Surviving R. Kelly” airs on Lifetime at 9 p.m. E/P from Thursday, Jan. 3 to Saturday, Jan. 5.
