Four years after the start of the #Metoo wave in the United States, the trial of fallen R&B star R. Kelly has brought the voices of black women victims of sex crimes, long silenced in the African American community, to the fore.
R. Kelly, singer known worldwide for his hit “I Believe I Can Fly” was found guilty on Monday by a New York court of a series of sex crimes, including that of having led for years a “system” of sexual exploitation of young women, including minors.
Nothing new, deplore defenders of victims of sexual violence today, but with the Kelly trial, it is the first time that the police, the judiciary, the media and public opinion have taken seriously the reality of these crimes in the black American community. .
“I have been harassed for years for exposing what this predator had done to me,” Jerhonda Pace wrote on her Instagram account after testifying at the trial against R. Kelly. “People called me a liar,” she recalled, when, still a teenager, she recounted the abuse inflicted by the artist.
For Kenyette Barnes, at the origin of the hashtag #MuteRKelly in 2017 – the same year as the global #Metoo movement triggered by the Harvey Weinstein affair – the American justice system made it possible for the first time to give an echo to “blood, to the sweat and tears of black women ”that American society until now did not want to see.
Long before the violence went viral on social media, African-American women were battling to alert authorities and public opinion in the United States. But for part of society, “black women are neither susceptible to rape nor credible,” denounces Ms. Barnes.
Child pornography
R. Kelly was convicted of all counts: extortion, sexual exploitation of a minor, kidnapping, bribery and forced labor, over a period of 1994 to 2018.
The first documented cases of the artist’s crimes date back to the 1990s, but nothing came out at the time because of his aura on his fans and thanks to those around him who protect his power and notoriety.
R. Kelly was acquitted in 2008 in a child pornography trial: a sordid videotape, sold under wraps, shows him committing sex crimes with a 14-year-old girl.
Chicago music critic Jim DeRogatis, who received the tape, turned it over to the police at the time and investigated R. Kelly’s actions for years.
It was “the most awful thing I had ever seen,” he told AFP today, judging that these images should have been enough to bring down the star. But at the time, it is silence and omerta in American society where “nothing matters less than young black girls,” laments Mr. DeRogatis.
It is always extremely hard for a victim of sexual violence to speak up. For women of “color”, it is almost impossible, says LaShanda Nalls, director of a post-traumatic care center in Chicago.
“#Metoo, not for black women”
Singer Sparkle, who was once close to R. Kelly, claimed during the 2008 trial that the girl in the child pornography video was her niece. Her testimony, she denounces this week in New York Magazine, cost her her career.
“Even at the time of #Metoo, I didn’t think it was for black women,” she says in this interview. “We are so marginalized. We don’t have the support that white women have. We are treated like less than nothing ”.
According to American sociological surveys, young African-American girls are more subject to the social pressures of “hyper-sexualization” tending to see them as adults from their puberty.
For example, a Georgetown University study concluded in 2017 that black girls were seen as less in need of “protection than white girls of the same age.” Or that black children looked “more adult” and sexually sensitive, sometimes as young as five.
Visions conveyed by a part of the American social body totally biased, denounce experts, but which could be explained by the history of racism in this country.
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