‘He took my virginity’: First witness in R. Kelly trial confronts singer and testifies she had sex with him at 16 after they met at courthouse

NEW YORK — Half her lifetime ago, Jerhonda Johnson Pace was a teenage R. Kelly superfan, a member of his MySpace fan club, so devoted that she went to the Cook County Criminal Courthouse in Illinois in 2008 to show support during the singer’s first criminal case.

She would walk up next to him as he went in and out of court, she said Wednesday. She vied for glimpses of him near the spot where his tour bus would park. And he noticed her, thanked her for her support, and once wished her a happy early birthday. She was about to turn 15.

This week, 13 years later and 800 miles away, Pace faced Kelly at another courthouse. This time, as the first witness against him in a federal racketeering case that could see him locked up for life.

Kelly and Pace had sexual contact beginning in 2009 when Pace was just 16, she said under oath from the Brooklyn federal courthouse.

She had told him she was 19, but after their first sexual contact she felt uncomfortable and showed him her state ID card proving her true age.

“He asked me, what is that supposed to mean?” Pace, now 28, recalled from the stand. “He told me to continue telling people I was 19, and act like I was 21.”

So began, in Pace’s telling, six months of repeated sexual contact with the much older R&B star, and escalating instances of physical abuse and control.

Prosecutors allege it was part of a decadeslong operation that leveraged Kelly’s outsized fame to target young victims, groom them, abuse them, and manipulate or blackmail them to keep them under his control. He faces a racketeering charge more commonly used against mob bosses, drug cartels and the like.

“He began collecting girls and women like they were things, hoarding them like objects,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Maria Cruz Melendez said in opening statements Wednesday.

Pace’s testimony, as well as opening statements by both sides earlier in the day, placed many of the events alleged in the indictment squarely in Chicago, where Kelly got his start busking at the “L” stations three decades ago.

In outlining their evidence for the jury Wednesday morning, prosecutors described the hotel in suburban Rosemont, Illinois, where Kelly married underage Aaliyah in the 1990s, the old Rock ‘n’ Roll McDonald’s in Chicago's River North neighborhood where he allegedly tried to pick up a teenager, and the studio on Chicago’s West Side that was the site of many of his alleged abuses.

Pace’s story is, by now, familiar, having been recounted in myriad media outlets since she went public with her allegations in 2017. And it combines many of the hallmarks of Kelly’s alleged criminal enterprise: Sex with a minor, some of it videotaped; the strict “rules” he made his partners follow; isolation from friends and family; physical abuse; and finally, a hefty settlement payout in exchange for the accuser’s silence.

That makes Pace a compelling choice for prosecutors’ first witness; but in opening statements, the defense told jurors that such consistent patterns are in fact signs that the witnesses are unreliable — making it up because they know the accusations get good play in the media.

“All of their stories, all of their explanations, they’re all going to sound kind of similar,” Kelly attorney Nicole Blank Becker said during her opening, which stretched on for more than two hours. “Using those buzzwords like, ‘I couldn’t eat, it was a cult,’ they’re amazing in the media ... that is audience-grabbing.”

Prosecutors on Wednesday previewed evidence about six alleged victims, referred to mostly by their first names or nicknames. Aaliyah, the now-deceased R&B ingenue whom Kelly allegedly married because she thought she was pregnant at age 15, is at the center of an accusation that an associate of Kelly bribed an official to get a phony ID showing she was 18.

Stephanie met Kelly at the Rock ‘n’ Roll McDonald's when she was a teenager; a year later, when she was 17, he had sex with her over the course of six to eight months, and Kelly filmed the encounters, making child pornography, Melendez said.

Sonja was a 22-year-old radio intern near Salt Lake City who flew to Chicago in hopes of an interview; instead she was confined to a room in Kelly’s studio for three days straight, then fell “immediately” asleep after drinking a warm Coke his associate handed her, Melendez said. She woke up with her underwear off, and saw Kelly in the corner doing up his pants, Melendez said.

“Zel” — known to be Azriel Clary — traveled with Kelly for five years, during which he “physically, sexually and psychologically abused her,” Melendez said, saying Kelly would sometimes violently beat her on a daily basis and make her have sex with strangers as “punishment.”

And Faith contracted herpes after having sex with Kelly, Melendez said, and when she sued him he threatened to release compromising photos and video of her if she didn’t drop the lawsuit.

Throughout the proceedings, Kelly, 54, sat silently at the defense table, stone-faced except for an occasional, barely perceptible frown.

The overflow room for members of the media was crammed with reporters, who watched the livestreamed proceedings on television monitors. Across the hall was a similar room for spectators, including family members of Joycelyn Savage, who have long alleged Kelly abused their daughter and held her under his control.

Jonjelyn Savage, Joycelyn’s mother, told the Chicago Tribune after the proceedings she thought Pace “made a good witness.” The testimony Wednesday was not difficult for her to watch, she said. She has been researching the allegations against Kelly for five years, Savage said, and so she was quite familiar with Pace’s story.

Pace, now 28, married and expecting her fifth child, recounted on Wednesday the first time she and Kelly had sex: In the “game room” at his mansion in suburban Olympia Fields, a south suburb of Chicago.

After he found out she was only 16, he told her he would “train” her on how to please him, Pace said.

“He took my virginity,” she said, in matter-of-fact terms.

After that first encounter, she said, Kelly made her a blue drink he called a “Sex in the Kitchen” — a reference to one of Kelly’s popular songs. “It was delicious and then I started to feel a bit ill.” She recuperated in a bedroom for awhile, and then someone in Kelly’s entourage gave her $50 and told her someone would take her to the train.

Pace said she did not recall how many times they were together in Olympia Fields, but it was always at his bidding, and when she was there she had to follow his “rules.”

At a certain point he took her phone away — letting her retrieve the memory card only after she said it had pictures of her dead niece on it. He gave her money for a new phone, and instituted a “rule” that she could not see a friend of hers who was also in his mansion in Chicago’s south suburbs.

“We were not able to leave out the rooms, whatever area we were in we could not leave out to meet up ... It was part of the rules. Rob’s rules,” Pace testified.

She had to wear baggy clothes around him, had to call him “Daddy,” stand up and kiss him or look at him whenever he entered a room, and when she disagreed with him she got a slap in the face or worse, she said. He would record them having sex and watch the tape with her afterward, to critique her performance, she said. Ultimately, she contracted herpes, she said.

When prosecutors asked her if she remembered her last day in the Olympia Fields home, her voice grew quiet. “Yes. I do.”

It was January 2010, and she was preoccupied with texting her friend, so she did not notice Kelly entering the room, she testified.

When she did not acknowledge him, he grew angry, and he didn’t believe her when she said she was texting a friend, she said.

“That’s when he slapped me and choked me until I passed out,” she testified. When she came to, he spit on her face and directed her to give him oral sex, she testified.

Pace is expected to take the stand again for much of Thursday for more questioning from prosecutors. The defense has not yet had a chance to cross-examine her, but in opening statements, Becker reserved some of her harshest criticism for Pace, saying her story is a “snowball” of lies that keeps getting bigger.

“I can’t even count as high as the number of untruths, stories you’re going to hear from (Pace) on that stand,” she said. “The proverbial word ‘groupie’ is an understatement, you’ll see, when it comes to (her) ... She’s going to claim she had this magnificent relationship with Mr. Kelly — until it was time to write a book.”

Becker’s opening statement, which ran for more than two hours, was so long that Judge Ann M. Donnelly recessed for lunch in the middle of it. Overall, it pointed to an argument that prosecutors overreached in charging him with racketeering, and Kelly is the victim of scorned women who want to make a name for themselves by accusing him.

“There will be so many untruths told to you that even the government will not be able to untangle the web of lies,” she said. “ ... (witnesses will) tell you all these negative things, they’re going to form a picture that basically Mr. Kelly is this monster.”

“Some of these relationships that Mr. Kelly had were beautiful,” she said. And many of the “rules” that prosecutors alleged Kelly forced his accusers to follow have benign explanations, she said.

The women wore baggy clothes because they didn’t want to attract harassment at Kelly’s concerts, and they urinated in cups not because they were denied permission to use the bathroom but because they were often on long tour trips in a van without a restroom, Becker said.

“Pee in a cup? Yeah, you might hear that,” she said. “It’s not illegal, ladies and gentlemen.”

At great length, she defended the use of the word “Daddy.”

“‘Daddy’ has now become equivalent to the worst word you could ever think of. ‘Daddy.’ Nobody was complaining about having sexual relationships with Mr. Kelly, but now you’ll hear a word from that stand (that) is a common word in sexual relationships and even not sexual relationships,” she said. “It’s a common, nice way of referring to someone, and that word is going to get slung in the mud.”

A few times, Becker praised Kelly’s mental acuity, his work ethic, his adoring fans and his beautiful music — until she had to stop when prosecutors objected or Donnelly called for a sidebar.

And repeatedly, she referred to the witnesses as “girls” before correcting herself to “women,” a fraught mistake in a trial that involves repeated allegations of sex with minors.

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(Crepeau reported from New York and Meisner from Chicago.)

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