R Kelly finds it “strange” that some of the dozens of women who have recently stepped forward to accuse Bill Cosby of sexual assault waited so long to speak, the R&B superstar said in a wide-ranging interview in GQ magazine.

“When I look on TV and I see the 70-, 80-, 90-year-old ladies talking about what happened when they were 17, 18, or 19, there’s something strange about it. That’s my opinion. It’s just strange,” Kelly said.

The singer, who catapulted to fame in the 90s and 2000s with songs like Bump and Grind and Ignition (Remix) has long been evasive on topics of sexual assault and rape in interviews ever since he was indicted on child pornography charges in 2002. Kelly was found not guilty after a trial in which the main witness refused to testify.

Kelly has also settled a number of other cases where he was accused of sexual relations with minors out of court, a decision he told GQ he regrets, saying his accusers were lying.

“All of them. And it wasn’t many. It wasn’t like it was a whole ton of people. But the people that did were absolutely lying. Absolutely,” Kelly told interviewer Chris Heath.

The 2002 charges stemmed from a video which appeared to show Kelly engaged in sexual acts, at his own home, with a girl believed to be 14 years old. Citing his lawyer’s instructions, Kelly told Heath he could not answer whether or not it was him in the video. “I’ve said certain things when it all first started, but that didn’t do no good. So I had to go get lawyers and they had to protect me. So now I’m under my lawyers’ advice,” Kelly said.

As he’s done in interviews before, Kelly went on to repeatedly imply that proof of his innocence could be found in the fact that fans still buy his albums, and buy tickets to his shows.

Chris Heath: “I think everyone thinks that it was you [in the video.]”

R Kelly: “Even the ones that buy my albums? ... I don’t think so. I don’t think so. I just think those people didn’t believe that nonsense. That’s what I think. And they said, ‘The hell with what other people are saying – we love R Kelly, we believe R Kelly, he was found innocent, he’s moving on with his life.’”

The interview also explored claims Kelly made in his 2012 memoir, Soulacoaster, of being sexually abused by a female relative repeatedly from the age of about seven to 14.

“I remember it feeling weird. I remember feeling ashamed. I remember closing my eyes or keeping my hands over my eyes. I remember those things, but couldn’t judge it one way or the other fully,” Kelly said.

And while Kelly maintained his unequivocal innocence throughout, he offered a take on how the impulse to commit sexual acts of violence against children may come about. “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,” Kelly said. “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.”