She told people that he was a perfect gentleman, that they should pray for him, that he was “nothing like what they say.”
Carter’s vision of Kelly was destroyed one day in February 2003, when Carter, then 24, said she was summoned to braid the singer’s hair. Once they were alone, she said, Kelly asked for a head massage. She told him she did not do massages. But then, she said, the singer pulled her head down by her braid, and demanded oral sex. She refused, and said he began masturbating and spitting on her face. She remembered vividly how much he spat.
“Six times,” Carter said, during an emotional interview that aired Thursday on “CBS This Morning.” Kelly only stopped, she said, when someone knocked on the door. “Fix your face,” she said he hissed at her, twice.
The interview marked the first time Carter has spoken publicly about her accusation against Kelly, who faces 10 counts of felony aggravated sexual abuse involving four women, including Carter.
She said she called police the day it happened, and that they took the Tommy Hilfiger shirt she had been wearing as evidence, because it had Kelly’s semen on it. But no charges were filed at the time, and Carter later reached two settlements with Kelly — one for $650,000, the other for $100,000 — in which the singer admitted no wrongdoing.
The second settlement was made after Kelly released a song about having sex with a woman who braided his hair. Under the settlement’s terms, he agreed to never perform it or include it on future albums.
The settlements came with nondisclosure terms, but according to Jericka Duncan, the CBS reporter who interviewed her, Carter came forward after Chicago’s top prosecutor urged victims to contact her office earlier this year.
Kelly, 52, whose full name is Robert Kelly, has pleaded not guilty to the charges and is free on bail. His lawyer, Steve Greenberg, said Thursday that police had done an extensive investigation of Carter’s complaint in 2003 and that prosecutors declined to file charges then. “I think that speaks volumes about the strength of the case,” he said. The Cook County state’s attorney’s office has declined to discuss that decision.
Kelly was charged in February after a Lifetime documentary series, “Surviving R. Kelly,” chronicled years of allegations that Kelly had sex with underage girls, and kept women in a “sex cult” in which he controlled their every move, including when they could eat and go to the bathroom.
Of the four women in Kelly’s criminal case, Carter, who is identified as L.C. in court documents, was the only one who was an adult at the times he is accused of abusing them.
Two were 16, under the age of consent in Illinois. One of them, Jerhonda Pace, was one of the first women to go public with her accusations. The other has not been publicly identified.
Prosecutors said the fourth woman was just 14 at the time and that they have a videotape showing Kelly having sex with her. They said she is the same girl he was accused of having sex with in a different videotape, which led to his child pornography trial. The girl refused to testify then, and he was acquitted; there is no indication that she will testify if the current case goes to trial.
Earlier this month, Kelly sat down for an interview with Gayle King of “CBS This Morning,” professing his innocence and at one point growing so emotional that he jumped out of his seat, cried out that he was “fighting for his life,” and had to be calmed. “I didn’t do this stuff!” he said. “This is not me!”
Carter said that Kelly’s interview had emboldened her to speak publicly about what he had done to her.
Right after it happened, she said, she rushed to the bathroom. She remembered steadying herself against the wall for support, reaching for a rose-colored towel, and staring at herself in the mirror in disbelief.
“I didn’t perceive myself to be nothing more than just his hair braider,” she said. “I was thinking to myself, ‘Why did this happen to me?’”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.