She was just 14 when she was groomed by the R&B star, and filmed in an explicit video. She tells the extraordinary story of how she survived
Picture Reshona Landfair in 1996 at 12 years old, when she met the R&B superstar R Kelly (real name Robert Kelly). Her world, she says, seemed like “a buffet” spread out before her. She was a popular girl, a seriously talented basketball player and the youngest member – in her words, “the pint-sized girl rapper” – of 4 The Cause, the singing group she had formed with three cousins. They’d been signed to a record label, made the Top 10 in eight countries and toured much of Europe. Her large extended family from the West Side of Chicago was tight-knit. Life was filled with music, sport, church, Sunday lunch at Grandma’s, family road trips and everybody knowing everybody’s business. “That was a beautiful time,” she says. “I had love and good people all around me. I was living in my true light of who I wanted to become. I felt like I was on my way.”
Fast forward to Landfair at 26 years old, when she finally left Kelly’s orbit. By then, half her family weren’t speaking to the other half, and the relationships that survived were charged with guilt, unasked questions and terrible past mistakes. She had no friends left, as Kelly hadn’t allowed it. Her hopes of a musical career were also long gone – Kelly had made her leave 4 The Cause when she was just 15. She had no qualifications beyond high school and no idea what she wanted to do because, for more than a decade, she’d relied on Kelly to tell her. She couldn’t imagine a healthy relationship; she’d learned sex, she says, “through the lens of a paedophile”. Every element of her 12-year-old life, everything on that “buffet table”, had been destroyed by Kelly. Yet she is still told regularly by total strangers that she must be a “gold digger”, that she “rode the gravy train” and took Kelly for all she could get.
