Jerhonda Pace, a 24-year-old married mother of three, has broken a signed non-disclosure agreement to reveal details about R. Kelly's alleged perverted sex life and how she was a victim while underage. In 2008, Jerhonda who was a 15-year-old high school student attended the RnB star’s trial on 14 counts of making child pornography and was eventually traumatized by a sexual relationship with Kelly when she turned 16.
To back up her claims, she has signed legal documents, drafts of settlements between herself and Kelly, correspondence between attorneys involved, a polygraph test performed at the request of her attorney regarding her relationship with Kelly and a subsequent payment made by Kelly’s management company to Pace.
Jerhonda claims to be concerned about women still living with Kelly in an abusive cult and is particularly concerned about a friend she brought into Kelly’s circle when they were both teenagers, who is believed to still be with him. Read Buzzfield's report below.
Pace says she first became a self-described R. Kelly “super-fan” when she heard his album Chocolate Factory at age 11. “My family listened to his music, my friends listened to his music, everybody was just in love with the music.
Her fandom didn’t fade when Kelly was indicted for making child pornography, Pace says. Once the trial began in May 2008, she attended the proceedings every day until Kelly’s acquittal on June 13 of that year. If convicted, Kelly could have been sentenced to 15 years in prison.
Looking back, Pace says she attended the trial because she was a fan and wanted to know what happened. “Did he really do it?” she recalls wondering. “I wanted to see everything for myself.” That included watching the notorious video when it was shown several times in court.
“At the time I was still, you know, pretty starstruck, so I was in disbelief.” Prosecutors alleged that the 26-minute, 39-second video depicted Kelly having sex with a 14-year-old girl, urinating in her mouth, and ordering her to call him “daddy.” Pace says watching the video was “disturbing.” But because the girl and her parents never testified— though 14 other witnesses, including her aunt, did identify the girl — Pace says she thought, Well, maybe that’s not the girl. If she would have come forward, I think it would have made a huge difference.
Outside of court at the time, she defended Kelly to multiple news outlets and met Kelly when he was walking into the court building, even getting his autograph.
In May 2009, a friend and employee of Kelly's friended Pace on Myspace and invited her to a party Kelly was throwing at his mansion in suburban Olympia Fields, Illinois. Pace, who had just turned 16, says she lied to her parents, telling them she was going to a friend’s house.
“I was a bit nervous,” she says. “Even though I had already met him at his trial, I was like literally at his house, so it did not feel real.” She remembers Kelly calling her over to the bar and telling her he had noticed her at the trial. He then asked for her cell phone and entered his number in it. “At the time I was still, you know, pretty starstruck, so I was in disbelief,” she says. Pace says she did not tell Kelly she was underage, and would later tell private investigators she claimed to be 19 years old at the time. (The age of consent in Illinois is 17.)
Not long after, on June 5, 2009, Pace says Kelly invited her to come back to his mansion and sent an employee to pick her up in a black SUV. “He told me that he wanted me to undress for him [and] walk back and forth like I was modeling,” she says. The two then had oral sex and Kelly made his first attempt to ensure that she did not talk about their sexual relationship by having her write out and sign letters stating that she had stolen jewelry and cash from him and that her parents had set her up to blackmail him.
Pace says she did as instructed, but none of the charges were true. On the next visit, Kelly gave her an alcoholic drink he called Sex in the Kitchen, which is also the name of a song he released in 2005. “I was drunk, because I wasn’t used to alcohol,” Pace says. The two had intercourse; Pace says she was a virgin, and Kelly thought that was exciting.
Over the next seven months, Pace says she had sex with Kelly repeatedly, a claim she would later repeat during her settlement process. Without asking her permission, Kelly filmed most of the encounters on his iPhone or a video camera on a tripod, Pace says and a settlement draft reiterates. “I had to call him ‘daddy,’ and he would call me ‘baby.’ He wanted me to have two pigtails, and I had to go out and find little schoolgirl outfits.”
If Kelly was previously unaware of Pace’s age, she says she told him for certain that she was 16 on July 17, 2009, a claim she also made in the aforementioned documents. “I gave him my state ID,” she says. She recalls that Kelly told her things were fine, but that she should tell anyone who asked that she was 19, and act like she was 25.
Pace says that she started spending weekends with Kelly at his Olympia Fields home. While she was in the mansion, she says, she had to follow Kelly’s “rules,” which included dressing in baggy clothes, turning over her phone, and asking permission to shower, eat, go to the bathroom, and leave the property. If she broke the rules, she says, she was mentally and physically abused.
“At the time, I didn’t know what I liked, honestly,” Pace says, explaining why she complied. “I just knew that I liked his music, so I was pretty much accepting of anything that came with him at the time.”
According to Pace, she and her 17-year-old friend, a fellow superfan she’d met on Myspace who sources say still lives with Kelly today, were hanging out at Kelly’s Olympia Fields mansion in July 2009 when police in two squad cards arrived in search of the friend, whose mother had called to complain that her young daughter was with Kelly. Pace, both when speaking to BuzzFeed News and during her 2010 polygraph test, says that Kelly called one of his attorneys, who advised his star client that he did not have to let the police into the house if they did not have a warrant.
“I was slapped and I was choked and I was spit on.” Pace says Kelly asked her to engage in threesomes, including with a woman who was best friends since high school with the girl in the videotape for which Kelly was tried.
She ended her relationship with Kelly in January 2010 after the two had an argument when Kelly caught her texting a friend. “I was slapped and I was choked and I was spit on,” she says, a claim repeated in the settlement draft and corresponding polygraph.
Pace says she left Kelly’s house, but contacted the offices of Chicago attorney Susan E. Loggans. “It was on their website that they had worked with a lot of women who went against Kelly, and I thought, Oh, that’s a good thing.”
Loggans declined to comment, but her firm has made extracting cash settlements from Kelly a specialized part of its practice. A 2011 ad for the firm boasts that high-profile clients have included “two underage girls who claimed the R&B superstar R. Kelly had sex with them.”
Loggans began negotiating other settlements between Kelly and young women she represented before lawsuits were ever filed. She has declined to say exactly how many settlements she has negotiated, other than to say they were “numerous.”
Loggans first sued Kelly for $10 million on Dec. 24, 1997, in a suit brought by Chicago woman Tiffany “Tia” Hawkins, an aspiring singer who claimed she met the star when he spoke to her sophomore choir class. According to the lawsuit, Hawkins began having sex with Kelly in 1991, when she was 15 and he was 24. The relationship ended in December 1994, when she was 18, the court documents state; distraught, she slit her wrists in an attempt to kill herself. The charges in the suit were not reported until years later, in a December 2000 Chicago Sun-Times article, the first major investigative story detailing Kelly’s illegal underage sexual relationships. The case eventually was settled out of court when Kelly paid Hawkins an undisclosed sum, sources said.
Loggans next sued Kelly in August 2001 when she represented another Chicago woman, Tracy Sampson, an aspiring rapper who claimed she lost her virginity to the star at age 17.
The last public lawsuit that Loggans filed against Kelly was in April 2002, when she represented Patrice Jones, a Chicago woman who claimed the star impregnated her when she was underage, and that one of his associates took her to have an abortion. The lawsuit alleged that the relationship began after Kelly met the 16-year-old in December 1998 at the Rock ’n Roll McDonald’s in Chicago after her high school prom. The case eventually was settled out of court when Kelly paid Jones an undisclosed sum, sources said.
According to Pace, within weeks of the meeting in Loggans’ office, the attorney had negotiated a large settlement with Kelly in return for Pace signing a nondisclosure agreement and declining to pursue any charges or other claims against Kelly.
Since Pace was still a minor, Loggans and her mother opened an estate on her behalf, according to Pace and court records obtained by BuzzFeed News. But Pace says she only received a fraction of what was owed her.
In 2012, Pace complained to Loggans’ assistant about late or missing payments from Kelly. In that period, Pace’s settlement was far from Kelly’s only expense: In 2009, Kelly divorced his second wife, Andrea Lee, with whom he had three children, and he was paying spousal and child support. In 2012, Kelly owed the IRS nearly $5 million in unpaid taxes dating back to 2005. In 2013, the star sold the Olympia Fields mansion once valued at more than $5 million for $950,000 years after it went into foreclosure.
Down the line, Pace says and other sources confirmed, she went on to sign a new settlement agreement with Kelly.
Pace says that she could face legal action for violating the terms of her agreement by talking publicly about her experience with Kelly. But given Kelly’s continued personal and professional success, and the crimes she says he committed, she says speaking out is worth the risk.
Pace is also considering pursuing criminal charges against Kelly. “I know speaking out against Kelly, Kelly could sue me. But I’m really not worried about it anymore,” Pace said. “I feel like this is a healing process for me, because I've been holding this in for so many years, and to see that he always gets away with it, it’s just not right. I’m just going forward with my head held high.
