R. Kelly Opens Up About Being Sexually Abused as a Child, Says It’s a ‘Generational Curse’

R. Kelly recently opened up about being sexually abused when he was seven or eight years old until he was around 14 or 15, and confirmed it was a female relative who molested him.

When asked on what he thinks now about what they did, he explained to GQ magazine:

‘I, well, definitely forgive them. As I’m older, I look at it and I know that it had to be not just about me and them, but them and somebody older than them when they were younger, and whatever happened to them when they were younger. I looked at it as if there was a sort of like, I don’t know, a generational curse, so to speak, going down through the family. Not just started with her doing that to me.’

The 49-year-old singer was found not guilty on all 14 counts during his child pornography trial in 2008. On why the so-called generational curse didn’t pass through the family onto him, He continued: ‘Well, you know, just like poverty, poverty was a generational curse in my family, too, but I decided that I’m gonna stop that curse. I’m not gonna be broke, like my mom was broke, my uncles were broke, my sisters didn’t have money, my cousins on down.

‘Generational curse doesn’t mean that the curse can’t be broken. Just like having no father, that’s a generational curse.

‘The poverty part was broken. And I feel the child-molestation part, that definitely was broken. But of course you gonna be misunderstood because you R. Kelly, and the success and things get mixed up in the music, and people take the words you sing in your songs and try to pound that on your head and say, ‘Ahh! You did do it – look what you just wrote over here.