This is a book written by someone who has watched, more than once, “All The President's Men.” Yes, “Soulless” by Jim DeRogatis is about R. Kelly's long history of sexual assault and a complex game of legal cover-ups. Kelly is in the same league as financial robber barons who use non-disclosure agreements the way some police officers use unnecessary force. It is also a book about Chicago, depicted here as a city so committed to its inferiority complex that its largest court system, in Cook County, features a portrait of Al Capone. But as much as this is an admirable account of Kelly's inexplicable appeal, the city too busy to punish him, the black women advocates who refused to give up on our society's moral debt, and the victims who bear its costs, this is a book about journalism.
Journalist, professor and drummer DeRogatis understands himself as the last of a dying breed in a profession that accidentally caught its own tail. Throughout the book he describes a brutal 18 years of tracking Kelly while also covering his other beats — music and culture. That punishing slog was a gift compared to today's journalism landscape, where such commitment is fiscally impossible. DeRogatis is clearly scarred by the economic fortunes of the Chicago Sun-Times, his former employer.
In the leadup to the book's conclusion, he comments at length on the disincentives for media companies to do the kind of long-form investigative reporting that may have finally wounded Kelly's image in 2017, eventually leading to the Lifetime documentary “Surviving R. Kelly” and a new wave of legal scrutiny culminating in February with charges on 10 counts of aggravated criminal sexual abuse. DeRogatis describes the series of mergers and acquisitions that changed how he worked at the Chicago Sun-Times. It is a microcosm of the financial plays being had across media companies. And investors do not like to buy companies that might be hit with lawsuits or negative publicity as fallout from a controversial story, no matter how socially important the story may be. It is a sympathetic case, but it should be noted that it was not a traditional publication that ran DeRogatis' final series — the one that captured the zeitgeist the way his early reporting on Kelly never did. After three other outlets passed on publishing the 2017 article he wrote about R. Kelly's “cult,” the digital publisher Buzzfeed — under the editorial auspices of a black woman editor, Shani O. Hilton — was the one to publish the expose. The real story may be that diversity in leadership might save journalism's soul if not fix its bottom line. Disruption is complicated.
What is straight-forward in this story is DeRogatis' hard-earned dictum, now destined to follow him the rest of his days: “No one matters less in our society than young black women.” Black women did not need to learn that, and it remains to be seen if anyone else who needs to learn it ever will. When DeRogatis commits to the “investigative critic” voice that offers that weighty truism, the book adds color to a story many of us feel we know all too well. His character study of Robert Kelly is a brutal corrective to R. Kelly's myth: that he is a troubled soul who used his God-given talents to make himself over into a sexy, sophisticated auteur who seduced an entire culture into forgiving the peccadillos of an artist whose art demands he live beyond society's moral boundaries.
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