R. Kelly takes care of video victim from the age of 12
One of R. Kelly’s most high-profile grooming victims has revealed that the rapper dug his claws into her from the age of 12, demanding she call him “daddy” and turning her into “a slave” whose name and life were consumed by his abuse for more than a decade.
RadarOnline.com can reveal abuse survivor Now 42, Reshona Landfair is speaking publicly under her own name for the first time in a new memoir, Who’s watching Shorty? Reclaiming myself from the shame of R. Kelly’s abusewill be released on Tuesday, February 3.
Former child rapper Landfair was once anonymized as Jane Doe in Kelly’s infamous child p—s– tape, but demands recognition as a woman and victim instead of a punchline in Kelly’s dirty s– case.
Landfair, who was 14 when the video at the center of Kelly’s first child pornography case was filmed, claims the singer methodically groomed her after coming into her family’s orbit in Chicago through her aunt, R&B artist Sparkle, gradually escalating into a regime of control, secrecy and violence.
She alleged that he insisted that she address him privately as “Daddy,” and then established an all-encompassing power over her movements, social interactions and career – often keeping her in cramped offices or studio spaces where she slept on makeshift beds and had to ask permission to eat or use the bathroom.
“He was always ‘Dad,’” Landfair writes. “Robert knowingly victimized me as a child. I was brainwashed by Robert and a slave. Robert made me suicidal as a young adult. It’s horrible to be me. I gave up my family for him. Nothing else mattered then. And I still don’t know why… by the time I was 16, 17 years old, he was the only thing that mattered. I was manipulated and independence didn’t seem like an option. Robert shattered me.”
Landfair’s nightmarish abuse account emerges more than two decades after the tape first surfaced and years after Kelly, 59 – born Robert Sylvester Kelly – was convicted in federal courts in New York and Illinois on charges including racketeering, illegal trafficking and producing child sexual abuse images; he is serving concurrent sentences of 30 and 20 years in a medium-security prison near Durham, North Carolina.
At the time the video circulated, Landfair said she was still a virgin and that her “soupy” state on camera was caused by Cristal champagne Kelly gave her, but the footage was smuggled onto street corners and used as fodder for comedy skits while she was publicly named and shamed.
Landfair ultimately took the stand of a protected Jane Doe in his 2022 federal trial in Chicago.
“He gave me a dirty look,” she says about the confrontation with Kelly in the courtroom.
“When he gave me that look, it was confirmation that I was in the right place. I was like, ‘The nerve of you to hear all these things that you’ve helped someone through, and to still feel like I owe you something, or that I’m being unfaithful? … That made it easy for me, because I was like, ‘You don’t understand. You think you’re untouchable. You’re still lying.'”
Landfair’s memoir also details what she describes as a cascade of institutional failures — from family members who she says fell into “total, naive denial,” to authorities and media who exposed her identity and played the 26-minute tape in open court.
“To the public, I was a mockery. I was never a victim, so I never saw myself as a victim,” she said, citing racism and stereotypes that black girls were “too fast” shaped the way her case was handled.
Landfair tried for years to disappear behind the nickname “Chon” to avoid recognition in connection with the video, but said the shadow of Kelly’s abuse followed every job, friendship and relationship.
“There’s no job I can apply for where this isn’t the foreground of my life. There’s no relationship where this isn’t the foreground of my life,” she says.
“Once I realized I had no peace or privacy by hiding, I had to take responsibility.”
Now working at a school-based health center in Chicago and leading a nonprofit mentoring organization for young women, Project Refine, Landfair tells publisher Who’s watching Shorty? is the final step in reclaiming both her story and her name from the man she once called godfather.
“I was afraid to say my own name and be who I really was to work, to friends,” she said. “I created Chon, and that’s what I’m going for. But I’m here today as Reshona.”
