The Real Housewives of Atlanta star Porsha Williams has opened up for the first time about her experiences with R. Kelly. The experience, she said, she shared with investigators who were over R. Kelly’s case, which includes conviction of racketeering and sex trafficking.
Williams told People, “I realized it was my opportunity to help anyone who’s been hurt by him. There had been so many other instances where I had been abused by men that my mentality [at that time] was of an abused person, and tht it was okay for me to be treated like that.”
She said she met a friend of Kelly’s in 2007, when she was considering going into the music industry, and was flown to Chicago to meet Kelly. Williams was under the impression that she might work with him on music, but when she arrived in Chicago, she was driven to Kelly’s home instead of to the studio.
Williams wrote in her upcoming memoir, 'The Pursuit of Porsha: How I Grew Into My Power and Purpose,' that her emotional state led her to feel like she had to comply.
“I’ve already put myself in this position,” she wrote, according to People. “This is what you’re supposed to do. You have to. There is no turning back.”
She also wrote that she saw Kelly twice more, with the other times including Williams seeing multiple young women in the house. She decided not to return once she woke up during a visit and heard a woman being beaten somewhere in the house. She said she kept her experiences a secret, even from family.
“It’s not something you want to tell your mom, because my mom is a very strong woman and she did her very best in raising me,” she said to People. “And I think for any woman or man who’s been in an abusive situation, you don’t want to tell your parents because you don’t want them to think that they had let you down in any way. I don’t want her to think that she had done anything wrong. And so I took it upon myself.”
However Williams said her mother was glad she finally confided in her, and her mother told her some of her own experiences with abusive situations.
“[W]e just talked about how this should be told so other women don’t have to go through it.”
Kelly’s history of abuse and trafficking was documented in the 2019 Lifetime docuseries Surviving R. Kelly. The docuseries created a firestorm of activism and outrage, culminating in the investigation that led to Kelly’s conviction in September.
