R Kelly should not be allowed to tour Australia

If ever there was a good use of Australia’s border control laws, it would be to keep alleged sexual predator R Kelly from touring here, writes Cameron Adams.

Celine Dion has also removed her duet with R Kelly from streaming services. Picture: Graham Hughes/The Canadian Press/AP

Australia, lock up your daughters.

No, really, lock them up.

Repellent singer and alleged sexual predator R Kelly has helpfully warned Australia, New Zealand and Sri Lanka that he plans to tour those three territories. Even more helpfully he included the alarm bell emoji.

You can’t make this stuff up.

R Kelly is the 52 year old singer whose career has been surrounded by scandal involving his predilection for younger women.

He married the late singer Aaliyah in 1994 when he was 27 and she was just 15, with someone in his camp altering her birth certificate.

They met when she was 12. At age 14 she released the debut album Kelly wrote for her. It was titled Age Ain’t Nothin’ But a Number, the lyrics of the title track the epitome of hiding in plain sight. Kelly literally put words in Aaliyah’s mouth that said don’t worry about my age “tonight we’re gonna go all the way.”

Last December Kelly shut down a “fake” Australian tour that surfaced on social media.

If a promoter had been locked in, they dodged a bullet after the Surviving R Kelly documentary aired in the US in early January.

While no Australian network has picked it up, it is explosive viewing and should be career-ending.

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Allegations of sexual misconduct with underage girls has followed R Kelly since his “marriage” to the then 15-year-old Aaliyah. Picture: Earl Gibson III/Getty Images

A string of women reveal how the singer groomed them (often from shopping centres or radio stations) when they were underage. They ended up joining his “sex cults” where they were forced to turn and face the wall whenever other men were in the room. They claim Kelly would also make them take part in threesomes — some with girls as young as 14.

Kelly has vehemently denied all the claims in the documentary, however the repercussions were instant.

Sony Music, who have been slammed for years for keeping Kelly on their books despite decades of rumours about his behaviour, finally axed him. The #muterkelly hashtag has moved into turbomode, although depressingly R Kelly’s songs enjoyed a major spike on streaming platforms in the US when the documentary aired.

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Lady Gaga and Celine Dion both pulled their collaborations with R Kelly from Spotify and Apple Music, with other acts he has worked with now under pressure to erase him from their history.

Kelly was found not guilty during a court trial for child pornography in 2008 but his private life went public when a tape of a person alleged to be him urinating on a girl alleged to be underage went viral.

Surviving R Kelly goes into graphic detail about how the court case unfolded and the way power and money can influence the world.

To demonstrate how removed from reality is, in 2008 in his first interview after the “pee tape” (which Kelly insists did not involve him) he was directly asked “Do you like teenage girls?”

His response was “When you say teenage, how old are we talking?”

Lady Gaga and R. Kelly perform their 2013 song "Do What U Want (With My Body)" at the American Music Awards. She has since removed the track from streaming services and apologised for her collaboration with him. Picture: John Shearer/Invision/AP

The singer needing clarification of what a teenager is is one of many alarming scenes in Surviving R Kelly. He admits he has “some 19 year old friends.”

The documentary also features one of R Kelly’s brothers saying his superstar sibling’s taste for younger women is merely a “preference”.

While some have escaped, he still has many women under his spell. Some were reportedly introduced to the singer’s orbit by their parents, who hoped they could help their daughter’s career. The mind boggles.

There are claims that the backlash to Surviving R Kelly in the US is so strong it may see more lawsuits against the singer launched, with more victims coming forward.

Meanwhile, the singer is shamelessly plugging new music as if it’s business as usual — and indeed there’s still apologist fans who are defending him.

Much like there were female fans of Chris Browns who tweeted “I’d let him smack me in the face” after his first TV performance when trying to rehab his career after beating Rihanna. (He had his visa for 2015 Australian tour revoked due to his history of domestic violence).

If this Australian tour is real, this would be a good use of Peter Dutton’s department’s powers.

While R Kelly has never been charged with a crime (although calling an album Black Panties must have broken some law of bad taste) the Home Affairs Department can refuse a visa if someone fails a character test.

Right-wing provocateur and Proud Boys founder Gavin McInnes was refused a visa last year on those grounds.

The Mute R Kelly movement have followed him when he’s played US shows — at a North Carolina show last year he played despite protests and handed out t-shirts to fans that read ‘Turn Up R Kelly’. Other shows have been cancelled after security fears were deemed too great.

You don’t need to look too hard into a crystal ball to see that an R Kelly tour of Australia would be a security nightmare, and any promoter would have to factor that into ticket prices.

If it does happen, there should be a policy that every show — and particularly any meet and greet — needs to be over 18 only.

For everyone’s safety.

Cameron Adams is a News Corp national music writer.

@cameron_adams