In recent weeks, singer R. Kelly has vehemently denied mounting accusations that he sexually abused teenagers and kept women in cult-like circumstances.
Now, one woman, 24-year-old Jerhonda Pace, is speaking out about living with Kelly, including how a “trainer” gave her instruction on how to have sex with the R&B singer and how she ended up leaving his house.
Pace appeared on an episode of The Real on Monday and described her experience.
“The trainer—it’s a woman—and she trains you to please him sexually,” she said on the daytime talk show. “She trained me for everything I was doing. She told me how to please him and she also taught me what I like.”
She described being invited to Kelly’s tour bus to meet the woman.
“So I went out there to his tour bus and you have him naked and you have her naked and I’m looking like, ‘Okay, what is this?’ Because Rob [Kelly] is the one who took my virginity,” Pace said. “I was like, ‘Ummm, yeah, so what’s going on?’ And he’s like, ‘Don’t worry about it.’ I guess he saw that I was looking uneasy.”
“That’s when he told me to look at her and he said, ‘She’s going to teach you everything you need to know. So she’s going to please you.’ And he told me to remove my clothes and that’s when me and her engaged in sexual activity. She was doing everything. I didn’t know. I was 16,” Pace said.
She said the abuse was physical, too.
“It’s very frightening. He would slap you in your face. He would physically harm you and he would put you in a room and he would lock you in the room for days. For days,” Pace said.
“He was preparing for a party at the time. I told him my uncle lived a few doors down and I wanted to go to my uncle’s house to grab some shoes. And he was like, ‘Okay, well when you get there, you get the shoes and you come right back.’ And at that moment, when I knew I got out the house, I was like, ‘I’m not going back. I refuse.’ I wasn’t going back.”
She said she only carried a cell phone with her when she escaped.
“I left everything and I just never looked back,” Pace said.
In a BuzzFeed article published last month, Pace broke her nondisclosure agreement to describe her relationship with Kelly, which began when she was 15. She said she met Kelly outside a courthouse in 2008, when the R&B singer was on trial for charges of child pornography, and that she lost her virginity to him at age 16.
H/T Billboard