Time’s Up Women of Color Want to Silence R.Kelly With #MuteRKelly Campaign

Women of Color within the #TimesUp movement are calling on businesses to sever their ties with the singer.

Update 4/30/18 4:22 p.m.

R. Kelly's team has shared a statement withBuzzFeed News, defending the singer against the Time's Up letter released Monday morning. "We understand criticizing a famous artist is a good way to draw attention to those goals," the statement reads. "And in this case it is unjust and off-target."

Read the full statement below. 

To Our Fellow Women of Color:

Original post below.

It’s long been time to pull the aux on singer R. Kelly, and now powerful women of color within the #TimesUp movement released a statement announcing their effort to join forces with the online campaign #MuteRKelly.

“The scars of history make certain that we are not interested in persecuting anyone without just cause,” the statement reads. “With that said, we demand appropriate investigations and inquiries into the allegations of R. Kelly’s abuse made by women of color and their families for over two decades now.”

The group includes producer Shonda Rhimes, actresses Rashida Jones, America Ferrara, Eva Longoria, Lena Waithe and Kerry Washington, director Ava Duvernay, attorneys Nina Shaw and Tina Tchen, and more. In their letter, the women specifically make demands against Kelly’s label RCA, as well as Spotify, Apple Music, Ticketmaster, and Greensboro Coliseum Complex, asking these entities sever their business ties with the artist.

The demands come after more than a decade of accusations against Kelly for sexual abuse of women and minors, specifically young black women and girls. The accusations have long been the butt of pop culture jokes from Dave Chappelle, The Boondocks, and others, but in the past two years, further investigative work by Jim DeRogatis revealed that Kelly’s sexual predatory behavior has all but stopped. To this day, the singer is allegedly running a sex cult from his homes in Atlanta and Chicago.

“For too long, our community has ignored our pain,” the Time’s Up letter reads. “As Women of Color within Time’s Up, we recognize that we have a responsibility to help right this wrong. The recent court decision against Bill Cosby is one step towards addressing these ills but it is just a start. We call on people everywhere to join with us to insist on a world in which women of all kinds can pursue their dreams free from sexual assault, abuse and predatory behavior.”

Recently there's been a shift in the narrative surrounding the once beloved singer. In the past month, Vince Staples called R. Kelly a “child molester,” the singer’s attorney and assistant resigned, and Jack Antonoff revealed he’s been begging RCA to take Kelly off the label.

The Women of Color message joins the #MuteRKelly campaign, asking people to sign a petition “telling Sony and Live Nation to #MuteRKelly for habitually preying on teenage girls for the past 25 years. Sign to tell Live Nation to cancel his upcoming shows and Sony to drop his recording contract.” The petition created last summer by Oronike Odeleye and Kenyette Barnes currently has more than 65,000 supporters of its goal of 70,000.

Read the Women of Color of Time’s Up letter below:

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