The Biggest Takeaways From the Final Night of ‘Surviving R. Kelly’

Lifetime’s Surviving R. Kelly docuseries came to an end on Saturday night. The show’s executive producer dream hampton has said that the final night of the series, which focuses on R. Kelly’s present-day allegations of sexual abuse, is the “most important” part. The fifth and sixth episodes outline how the singer has managed to remain a free man despite the mounting allegations against him before the series ends with the heartbreaking reminder that multiple alleged victims remain missing. If you haven’t had a chance to watch, these are the biggest takeaways from the final night of Surviving R. Kelly.

Survivors say R. Kelly’s alleged abuse continues to this day

The last episodes of Surviving R. Kelly include scenes that show families trying to rescue their daughters in 2018. One mother successfully locates her daughter Dominique from a hotel room, and finally brings her home after several attempts. Other families are unsuccessful. The father of a victim named Joycelyn Savage says, “It’s been almost two years now, and we still haven’t seen our daughter.” The parents of another victim, Azriel Clary, say they haven’t seen their daughter since her high school graduation in 2016.

An anonymous former employee says that Kelly has become more “clever” about his crimes over time. “When the Savages first came out, talking about Joycelyn, R. Kelly had meetings to strategize to fix the situation,” he says. “The first thing was to put Joycelyn in front of the camera on TMZ, which is something he ordinarily would not have done. [...] As far as the video Joycelyn Savage made, I would say that it was scripted, because Robert does not allow those girls to say anything that he has not told them to say.”

Survivors say that Kelly was also bold enough to continue interacting with the girl from the infamous 2002 “pee tape” years after it was released. Kitti Jones, who met Kelly in 2011, says she recognized the girl in the tape as someone Kelly had introduced her to shortly after they met.

A survivor says she was choked until she blacked out, and victims were forced to pee in buckets

“I felt like a prisoner,” survivor Jerhonda Pace says of the conditions in R. Kelly’s house. “I didn’t have anyone to talk to. It was just me. I went into a depression. I was mentally drained, because he would break me down, then build me up, then make me feel like shit again, then do it all over again. He would really manipulate my mind. The breaking point for me was when Rob slapped me, and he choked me until I blacked out.”

Multiple survivors say that instead of the bathroom, they were forced to use buckets in their rooms, and they could only empty the buckets with Kelly’s permission.

R. Kelly reportedly picked a female victim to be his “boy toy”

A former employee of Kelly’s says the singer picked a victim named Dominique and treated her like a boy. “To Robert, Dominique is, like, the rebellious one,” the former employee says. “She stays in trouble to him. She’s a little tomboyish, and Robert plays on that. So he has molded her into the boy he wants her to be. So he’s had her shave all her hair off, and she carries herself like a boy. He’s even had her dress in boy clothes and paint a beard and moustache on to look like a boy. So he treats her like his boy toy.”

He reportedly makes girls write false accusations against themselves

People around Kelly say he protected himself by forcing his victims to make up lies about themselves. According to a former employee, “He does make the girls write statements with false accusations against themselves, either saying that they’ve stole something from them or that their parents have stolen something from them or even that the parents tried to bribe him, or something of that sort.”

R. Kelly allegedly picked some of his victims out of the crowd at shows

Parents of one 17-year-old victim say Kelly saw their daughter in the crowd at his concert and invited her onstage. She was asked to exit through the back of the stage, where he gave her a number to contact him. The young girl liked to sing, so she was reportedly under the impression that he could help her career. Multiple people around Kelly say he implied to young girls that he could make them into stars because of his influence in the music industry.

Chance the Rapper regrets making a song with R. Kelly

Chance has received heavy criticism for collaborating with Kelly on the 2015 track “Somewhere in Paradise.” The final episode of Surviving R. Kelly includes a clip from a Cassius interview in which Chance says, “Making a song with R. Kelly was a mistake. I didn’t value the accusers’ stories because they were black women. I made a mistake.” Chance followed this by tweeting on Saturday night, “The quote was taken out of context, but the truth is any of us who ever ignored the R. Kelly stories, or ever believed he was being setup/attacked by the system (as black men often are) were doing so at the detriment of black women and girls. I apologize to all of his survivors for working with him and for taking this long to speak out.”

What's next?

What do we do after watching all six parts of Surviving R. Kelly? Executive producer hampton told Complex that a major takeaway should be, “Believe black women.” Throughout the series, several of the interview subjects say Kelly wouldn’t have been able to get away with his alleged crimes if the women he targeted were white. Jerhonda Pace says, “Nobody cares about the black women that speak out.”

Pointing out that everyone needs to keep attention on the story until Kelly faces legal consequences, radio personality Tom Joyner says, “We have to keep pushing, and keep pushing until we get some indictments.”

In the final episode of the series, the father of Joycelyn Savage (who is still allegedly with Kelly) looks at the camera and says, “R. Kelly, if you’re watching this, I just want to hear our daughter’s voice.”