Lisa Van Allen had barely turned 18 when she suddenly found herself swept up in a whirlwind romance with R. Kelly, a rising R&B superstar who gave her money to quit her job and come live with him in his Chicago studio and a hotel, a federal jury heard Thursday.
Their relationship was romantic. It was intensely sexual. And though she didn’t like it, Van Allen said their sexual encounters also sometimes involved others — including a girl Kelly described as his 16-year-old neighbor. Kelly also videotaped them, she said.
Then, one day in 2000, Van Allen said she found herself alone with a duffle bag that was full of Kelly’s clunky VHS tapes. She said she decided to go digging for a tape of their threesomes, popping cassettes into a VCR and fast-forwarding through scenes of Kelly having sex with various people. She said she felt disgusted, but she finally found a scene featuring herself, Kelly and the “neighbor,” who Van Allen later realized was younger than she’d been told.
Van Allen said she took the tape. And seven years later, after Kelly and his team doled out thousands of dollars to recover what she took, she said Kelly business manager Derrel McDavid made a chilling remark.
She said McDavid told her “they should have murked” — or killed — “me from the beginning.”
“I never knew that they were thinking about killing me,” Van Allen said, breaking down on the witness stand Thursday during Kelly’s latest federal trial in Chicago.
Featured prominently in the 2019 Lifetime docuseries “Surviving R. Kelly,” Van Allen is now a key witness in an alleged early-2000s conspiracy to recover tapes of Kelly sexually abusing an underage girl and to rig his earlier 2008 child pornography trial in Cook County.
Also on trial are McDavid and a former Kelly assistant, Milton “June” Brown.
Wearing a blue blouse and smiling as she entered the courtroom, Van Allen answered questions matter-of-factly about the early days of her relationship with Kelly. Though she has previously said she was 17 when she met Kelly at a video shoot in Georgia in 1998, she acknowledged Thursday she had just turned 18.
However, she seemed to fight through tears at other times in her testimony, including after McDavid defense attorney Beau Brindley began to cross-examine her. Brindley repeatedly questioned her about the circumstances in which she and McDavid at one point allegedly watched the video she took.
Van Allen then became particularly upset and said, “I’m tired of saying that we watched child pornography.”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah, ok,” Brindley replied.
Some jurors appeared to nod and comment to each other at that point.
The underage girl who allegedly appears on that video, now 37, testified last week under the pseudonym “Jane.” But in one bizarre episode during Brindley’s cross-examination, Brindley and Van Allen repeatedly made the mistake of using Jane’s real name in front of the jury.
A female juror seemed to cringe every time Jane’s real name slipped out, at one point hiding her head under her notebook.
In another surreal moment, in an effort to point to inconsistent comments by Van Allen, Brindley showed jurors a clip from “Surviving R. Kelly.” Van Allen could be seen sitting at the witness stand, surrounded by monitors featuring her image from the docuseries.
Brindley interrogated Van Allen about her age when she met Kelly, insisting that her claim that she had sex with the singer when she was 17 meant she could be a victim and “sell books.”
Van Allen retorted, “I don’t want to be a victim.”
The day she went digging through Kelly’s duffle bag for the videotape, Van Allen said she was nervous and afraid that Kelly would “walk in the room before I was finished.”
“I wasn’t supposed to be in the bag,” Van Allen said. “I was sneaking.”
Van Allen said she finally spotted herself on a tape that featured three sex scenes. Two allegedly depicted Kelly and Jane, while the third featured all three of them. At one point Thursday, Van Allen explained to jurors that she didn’t want Kelly “watching the tape.”
But she said she didn’t want it in her possession, either, so she gave it to a friend named Keith Murrell. During Brindley’s cross-examination, she said it never crossed her mind to destroy the tape.
In 2001, she said she left Kelly because her life had basically been “frozen” ever since she met him. Then, in 2007, she said she learned that Murrell still had the tape she’d given him — and that it could be for sale.
To stop it from getting out, Van Allen said she turned to Kelly, who at the time was facing child pornography charges in Cook County based on a different video.
“I knew that he would have the most to lose,” Van Allen said, “and he could get it back.”
She said Kelly told her to come to Chicago to talk about the tape, and they wound up meeting naked in a jacuzzi at his home in Olympia Fields. She said he promised her $250,000 to spend however she needed in order to get the tape back.
Prosecutors have said Murrell then agreed to return the tape. But, in March 2007, Van Allen said she visited Chicago and took the first of three polygraphs for Kelly’s team. During that visit, she also said she watched the tape with McDavid at a hotel — a point Brindley later tried to undermine.
Van Allen and Murrell were ultimately paid a total of $100,000 each, according to Kelly’s indictment. But Van Allen said McDavid held back some of her money at one point, complaining that, “it was because of me that they had to pay out all this money.”
During a visit in July 2007, Van Allen said McDavid also made the comment about how “they should have murked me from the beginning.” She said McDavid told her to falsely tell a lawyer that she’d never had sexual contact with Jane.
“He told me to say it,” Van Allen said. “And I was afraid not to do what he asked.”
