He reportedly still carries the bullet in his shoulder. But a close Kelly associate later tells the Sun-Times that his mother Joann said on her deathbed that Robert invented the story of the shooting to cover a suicide attempt. In Soulacoaster, he describes the shooting as a stray bullet that does not cost him his bike. 1980: Kelly shot at age 13Īfter he becomes a star, Kelly often tells the press that he was shot at age 13 when some thugs tried to steal his Huffy bicycle. Friends and associates later tell The Chicago Sun-Times that Kelly said he was sexually abused by the man. In his autobiography, Kelly writes that starting at age 8, he sometimes watched older men and women having sex that he once was given a Polaroid camera, instructed to photograph a couple having sex, and found that “the photographic technology impressed me more than the sex” that at age 8 he was raped by an older woman, ordered to keep it a secret, and that “she did it repeatedly for years,” and that as a preteen he was approached sexually by an older man in the neighborhood. … As I crept up in age… I found myself more curious and sometimes aroused, and I was ashamed of being aroused.” 1975: Sexual abuse of Kelly begins “When my mother wasn’t around, the women ran a little freer. Joann and her mother do their best for the children, but they are joined at various times by other women living in the same house or nearby: “Cousins, aunties, friends of my aunties, all older women,” Kelly writes in his 2012 autobiography Soulacoaster: The Diary of Me.

The family lives at various times in the projects on 63rd Street, a small house at 40th and Martin Luther King Drive, and a small house at 107th and Parnell, which the singer revisits 25 years later as the setting for the video of “I Wish.”

Little is known about his father, who was missing through most of his childhood. Robert Sylvester Kelly is born as the third of four children raised on the South Side of Chicago by a single mother, Joann, a school teacher and a devout Baptist. Kelly headlining Pitchfork Music Festival, WBEZ’s Jim DeRogatis conducts a series of conversations with smart, passionate cultural critics. Kelly’s life, including a musical career that has sold 54 million albums worldwide and a pattern of behavior that led to his trial in May 2008 on charges of making child pornography.Īhead of R. This timeline chronicles important events in Chicago native R.

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