R. Kelly Accuser Faith Rodgers Says Singer 'Needs to Go to Jail for Forever'

"There needs to be no getting out, no anything," Faith Rodgers said of R. Kelly, who is currently incarcerated in Chicago

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Published on January 2, 2020 02:05 PM

Faith Rodgers, one of numerous women who have accused R. Kelly of sexual abuse, hopes that the disgraced R&B singer will spend a lifetime in jail.

Rodgers, who is featured in Surviving R. Kelly Part II: The Reckoning — the follow-up to Lifetime’s bombshell documentary series — spoke with CBS News about Kelly, 52, who is currently incarcerated and facing charges of sex-trafficking, sexual assault and child pornography spread throughout Brooklyn, Chicago and Minneapolis.

“He needs to go to jail forever. There needs to be no getting out, no anything,” Rodgers, 21, said, noting how many women had come forward with allegations against him.

“It hasn’t just been me,” she said. “It’s a track record. So even if it’s not justice for me, for the next person, that’s good enough.”

Rodgers, who has said she first began a relationship with Kelly when she was 19, filed a lawsuit against the singer in 2018 for alleged sexual battery, false imprisonment and failure to disclose a sexually transmitted disease, The New York Times previously reported.

Ahead of Rodgers’ interview with CBS News, an attorney for Kelly released a statement to the network, dismissing Lifetime’s follow-up series as “lies and distortions” and claiming the women “are not victims, they are profiteers.”

“It’s actually something I’ve learned to just laugh at at this point,” Rodgers said in response to the statement, as her father, Pastor Charles Rodgers added that his daughter decided to come forward in order to hold Kelly “accountable” for his alleged actions as well as to help “other victims”

“It’s never been about money,” he said.

In a copy of Rodgers’ suit obtained by Variety, she claimed Kelly regularly abused her “mentally, sexually and verbally,” and used his iPad to film her performing “deviant and compromising” sex acts against her will.

“He was demanding that I do stuff on camera that I wasn’t comfortable doing whatsoever,” she previously told the BBC.

She went on in the complaint to allege that Kelly never divulged the fact that he had herpes, and she found out only after discovering she had contracted the disease herself.

Kelly has maintained his innocence throughout his legal troubles.

In December, the singer, who remains incarcerated in Chicago, pled not guilty to a recent federal charge accusing him of bribing an Illinois government employee to issue a then 15-year old Aaliyah Haughton a fake ID, so that he could legally marry her, according to multiple outlets. Kelly was 27 at the time.

The new bribery allegation against Kelly expand on the existing indictment brought against him in the summer of 2019.

In June, he pleaded not guilty to 11 felony sexual abuse counts after he was charged by Cook County prosecutors in Chicago in May. The charges included five counts of aggravated criminal sexual assault, stemming from one accuser who claimed Kelly abused her in 2009 and 2010 while she was underage.

A month later, the singer was arrested again and indicted on federal charges including child pornography, racketeering and obstruction of justice in both Illinois and New York, indictment documents and his lawyer confirmed.

He has remained jailed since being denied bail.

Then in August, Kelly was charged with two sex crimes in Minnesota after allegedly paying a teen girl $200 to dance nude back in 2001.

Kelly is scheduled to face trial in federal court in Chicago this April for charges of child pornography and obstruction of justice, according to the Associated Press, before standing trial in Brooklyn in May.

Surviving R. Kelly Part II: The Reckoning, airing in three parts on Jan. 2, 3 and 4, will examine the impact of the original series, which was first broadcast in January 2019. In addition, it will also provide an update on the lengthy list of R. Kelly‘s legal battles, which have spread across multiple states.

The follow-up docuseries will feature several women who came forward in the original, including Jerhonda Pace and Kitti Jones, as well as figures like investigative journalist Jim DeRogatis, State’s Attorney for Cook County Kimberly Foxx, #MeToo Founder Tarana Burke, and Michael Avenatti — a lawyer who represents a number of Kelly’s accusers.