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R. Kelly’s Trainwreck Interview Shows He’s Still Listening to Bad Advice

Manny Otiko
4 min readMar 7, 2019

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I hoped I was done writing about embattled R&B singer R. Kelly, but the sordid affair keeps creating newsworthy events. Yesterday, I watched transfixed as Kelly, real name Robert Kelly, gave one of the worst TV interviews of the year — and it’s only March!

In Tuesday’s interview with “CBS This Morning” co-anchor Gayle King, Kelly, who’s facing 10 counts of sexual abuse, ranted, screamed, sweated, cried, stood up and at one point looked like he was going to hit her. He also claimed he has “been assassinated.”

However, King maintained her poise and calmly kept steering his rant back to questions about his behavior with women. At times, she sounded like a mother admonishing a child.

After I recovered from watching the spectacle, my first question was who let him do the interview in the first place? Kelly is facing so much bad publicity that at this stage, he’s better off laying low and hoping he can beat the charges. His media team must have known that King was going to ask him pointed questions about his sexual past and they should have prepared him how to best answer them.

During the King interview, Kelly claimed being sexually molested hasn’t affected him. In the Lifetime…

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Manny Otiko
Manny Otiko

Written by Manny Otiko

Manny Otiko writes about race, politics and sports. He has been published in Salon and LA Weekly. Follow him at @mannyotiko.bsky.social

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