Back-up singer to R Kelly, Jovante Cunningham, has claimed that she saw him having sex with 15-year-old Aaliyah in 1994 when he was 27.
She made this known in Lifetime’s upcoming show ‘Surviving R. Kelly’, which will air on Thursday.
Talking about being on the road with Aaliyah, Jovante said,
“She truly was a beautiful young lady. We used to sneak Aaliyah out of the hotel room and take her all over the place,” says Cunningham. Aaliyah would go on to make it big with her debut R. Kelly-penned single “Age Ain’t Nothing But a Number.” “Those were the good old days,” says the former backup singer, “but those are the things that also make you cry.”
‘On a tour bus, there really aren’t many confined spaces. When you get on the bus there are bunks and so these bunks have little curtains you can pull at night if you don’t want anybody to see you sleeping.’
‘So it just so happened we were all laying in our bunks and the curtains are open, everybody’s communicating, laughing, when the [room] door flew open on the bus.,’ she recalled.
When she was asked what she saw, she replied: ‘Robert was having sex with Aaliyah.’
Asked to explain more of what she saw, Cunningham responds: “Things that an adult should not be doing with a child.” She adds, “I can’t stress to you how people are still suffering behind things that went on 20 years ago.”
