R. Kelly reportedly silenced Aaliyah and her family with several non-disclosure agreements following their short-lived 1994 marriage and annulment.
The revelations were made in the latest installment of Lifetime’s Surviving R. Kelly: The Final Chapter docu-series. The NDA between both parties was used as evidence against the disgraced R&B singer in his 2022 federal trial.
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According to court documents, Baby Girl and Kellz secretly got married in an illegal ceremony in August 1994 when she was just 15. The wedding took place using forged documents that showed Aaliyah to be 18 years old while Kelly was 27 at the time. The late singer’s parents forced her to annul the marriage months later in February 1995.
In a new episode of Surviving R. Kelly, the 12 Play hitmaker’s childhood friend and former security guard Gem Pratt claimed that Aaliyah’s father was irate at the secret marriage and forced the annulment. To avoid any legal action against him, Kelly reportedly had Aaliyah’s family sign an NDA in exchange for the financial rights to his first three albums.
Journalist Jim DeRogatis added of the NDA: “It’s a harrowing document. A non-disclosure agreement on both her part and Kelly’s, vowing not to pursue further legal claims for physical abuse. So, it wasn’t just an underage sexual relationship, he hit her, allegedly, according to that court document.”
Kelly worked in tandem with a teenage Aaliyah as the primary songwriter and producer of her 1994 debut album Age Ain’t Nothing But A Number after they were introduced by her uncle Barry Hankerson.
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“Her dad didn’t want her anywhere near [R. Kelly],” Pratt said. “This was not a one-man operation. Most people in that camp knew that a lot of these girls were underage. They had to.”
Another survivor of Kelly’s abuse named Ebonié Doyle described one instance on Surviving R. Kelly where she accidentally stumbled upon a sex tape involving R. Kelly with a young Aaliyah.
“I see this basket full of tapes, and I’m like, ‘Well, maybe I’ll just grab one of these tapes, and let me go in the other rooms and see if there’s a VHS so I can watch a movie,’ because I was bored,” Doyle said. “That’s when I discovered that he’d been lying to me about Aaliyah.
“The tape that I put in was of him and Aaliyah together. What I saw on that tape was he and Aaliyah being intimate. They were on the tour bus, and everything that I had asked him was confirmed on the tape.”
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When Kelly caught her, an argument over the tape ensued, and he ended up shoving her down a flight of stairs.
R. Kelly is currently serving a 30-year sentence at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in Chicago after being found guilty of one count of racketeering and eight counts of violating the Mann Act in 2021.
