A parallel story unfolded in journalism over the last two decades. In this one, a reporter from Chicago breaks the Kelly child sex allegations and pursues them relentlessly — even as an influential critic, from his perch in the cultural section of the nation’s most powerful newspaper, in his own relentless fashion lauds Kelly over and over again as a pop genius, and downplays the reports coming out of Chicago.

R. Kelly is back in the news thanks to Surviving R. Kelly , a powerful six-part documentary that became a social media sensation. If you didn’t know it before, it’s now clear: The Kelly tale is uniquely sordid. Most notoriously, he was put on trial in Chicago in 2008 after a tape surfaced that prosecutors said showed him having sex with, and urinating on, a 14-year-old girl. But it continues to this day, with new accusations made to police that he is keeping a number of women in his various homes cut off from family and friends.

What the Times story doesn’t say is the role, or rather the lack of one, the Times itself played in the R. Kelly story.

The six episodes “feature women who described being controlled or abused by him,” the New York Times reported, “often when they were teenagers, as well as associates and relatives of the singer."

Today, 10 years later, he’s back in the news thanks to Surviving R. Kelly , which premiered on Lifetime two weekends ago and has been running incessantly on the channel since. The six hours of documentary consist in large part of on-the-record testimonies of women — by turns scorching and heartbreaking — who say Kelly approached them when they were underage and then assaulted or abused them.

But prosecutors could not convince the jury, and in June 2008, he was acquitted. Kelly and his team have always denied that he had sex with minors or that he filmed children having sex, and all of the other assault and abuse charges against him.

Kelly’s legal team said that it was not Kelly on the tape, then suggested that he’d been inserted into it by computer manipulation. They argued that the man on the tape was actually the singer’s brother. Then they argued that the girl was an adult. When his case went to trial, prosecutors could not get the young woman in the video or her family to testify. They opted to charge Kelly with making child pornography. The tape was shown publicly to jurors; one woman testified that she knew the tape featured Kelly and the particular girl because the witness had herself participated in group sex several times with the pair, which the star had also filmed.

The girl was identified by family members as being 14 at the time, and she was referred to by name by Kelly on the tape. The story DeRogatis and Pallasch wrote about the tape soon produced legal charges against Kelly, which the star fought aggressively. It took local prosecutors six years to get him on trial.

The pair’s pursuit of the story paid off, in a way, a year later, when DeRogatis received an anonymous package — a VHS tape that showed someone who looked a lot like R. Kelly having sex with a girl who looked an awful lot like the daughter of one of the members of his entourage. The tape ended with Kelly urinating in the girl’s mouth.

DeRogatis, the paper’s pop critic, teamed up with Abdon Pallasch, a court reporter at the paper, and produced a bombshell story in December of that year detailing charges that Kelly had been having sex with underage girls .

In 2000 , Jim DeRogatis, a writer at the Chicago Sun-Times, began looking into allegations he’d been hearing about a superstar who’d been raised on the city’s South Side. At the time, R. Kelly was known as a protean pop auteur who’d produced the uplifting megahit “I Believe I Can Fly” — and also rougher R&B tracks filled with innuendo and raw sexuality.

The DeRogatis exposés came before the arrival of Facebook and Twitter. While Kelly’s eventual trial in 2008 was covered widely, the sensational stories in the Sun-Times in the years before the trial were overlooked by many publications. Kelly’s predilections were no secret — the comedian Dave Chappelle produced a devastating parody of Kelly on his hit Comedy Central show in 2003 — but many outlets, perhaps challenged by even how to report the facts of the case in a way that would not induce readers to lose their breakfasts, passed on the story or reported on it elliptically.

The New York Times, however, played a special role. One of its music critics, Kelefa Sanneh, emerged as R. Kelly’s most influential critical champion during this time, arguing again and again that Kelly was a pop visionary of the highest order. The stories he wrote — two or three substantive pieces annually in the years before his trial, a major coverage investment by the Times — are a journalistic case study in the challenges of how to write about an artist’s art at a time when the artist’s life has become toxic.

Sanneh chose to downplay the charges against Kelly, and even to portray the singer as a victor over his troubles, because he kept producing successful records and tours.

The result was a bizarre ongoing skein of coverage. Reams of marveling prose about the singer’s talents were mixed with sotto voce asides about sex and legal troubles. These were always described vaguely and then buried with more verbiage of helpless admiration.

The stories, and their headlines, were written in a tone of amused surrender. “R&B’s Eccentric, Unbowed,” read one typical headline.

Here’s a passage from Sanneh in a 2006 concert review, “R. Kelly at Radio City: Songs Served With a Side Order of Ham”:

Mr. Kelly, the legendarily freaky R&B star, long ago established himself as one of the greatest singer-songwriters of his generation. The sex scandal that threatened to derail his career in 2002 ended up doing the opposite: it made him more productive, more successful and, somehow — maybe because more people began paying attention to his excellent music — more respected than ever before.

Here are many of the elements that would characterize the Times’ coverage of Kelly. Sanneh made it sound as if the sex scandal were over, when of course Kelly had not yet been brought to trial. And the assertion that Kelly was more respected than ever was dubious at best.

A few paragraphs down, Sanneh mentioned the scandal again, but elided the nature of the tape:

Mr. Kelly’s career is a prime example of how to survive scandal. After the discovery of a pornographic videotape that the police say shows him with a minor, Mr. Kelly returned with some of the raciest songs of his career; he didn’t sound ashamed, so people weren’t ashamed to listen. During Tuesday’s show, he was more comedian than lothario. His voice was strong but not overpowering — he had to save his breath for the asides.

Again the scandal is mentioned only in the context of Kelly triumphing over it. And Sanneh didn’t mention that a key tool Kelly had to “survive scandal” was the major news outlets that weren’t telling readers what the scandal was about.

Long before this, more and more stories had emerged about Kelly. DeRogatis wrote a 2002 GQ magazine piece featuring on-the-record testimony of teenagers describing how Kelly and his entourage picked them up at a Chicago McDonald’s as a start to sexual relationships. The piece details many instances of abhorrent behavior; one 16-year-old said she was later coerced into getting an abortion — a claim Kelly’s attorneys denied. (I knew DeRogatis well when I lived in Chicago, and created the radio show Sound Opinions with him in the 1990s; his R. Kelly stories came out after I had left the city.)

Various lawsuits alleging sex with minors had been filed against the singer as well. (Most were settled out of court.) In June 2002, even as Kelly was being indicted in Chicago for the sex tape, he was arrested again in Florida, after police found nude pictures of young girls on the singer’s camera. (A judge ruled that the material had been seized improperly, and the case was thrown out.)

The Times kept publishing flattering portraits of Kelly, always with the allegations downplayed and bracketed with positive prose. The story by Sanneh I quoted above was not unusual. Here he is again reviewing a 2007 Kelly album:

Five years ago a sex scandal threatened to dethrone [Kelly], but in the end it merely gave him more of what every star needs: attention and motivation. A double-entendriffic comeback hit, “Ignition (Remix),” marked his return in 2003; since then he has affirmed his position as one of the era’s greatest and weirdest pop stars. He still faces 14 counts of child pornography, stemming from a widely circulated video that allegedly shows him with an under-age girl. (The trial hasn’t begun.) But you’d never guess it from “Double Up,” which might be the most cocksure album of his career.

Sometimes Sanneh didn’t even bother to mention the legal problems at all, as in a 2007 roundup of R. Kelly guest appearances on some then-current R&B tracks. Worse, the piece took the Kelly whitewashing to another level. Mentioning the singer Ciara, Sanneh wrote, “She is often compared to Mr. Kelly’s onetime protégé Aaliyah, who died in 2001.” What a nice guy R. Kelly is, an unknowing reader might think. He mentors young singers. How protégériffic!

Ciara fans might well have hoped the similarity to Kelly’s mentorship ended there. Sanneh didn’t tell readers that the singer Aaliyah had joined Kelly’s label at the age of 12, and that at 15 she was married to Kelly, with her age falsified on the marriage certificate. Her parents managed to separate their daughter from Kelly soon after. Kelly denied the charge despite the publication of the marriage certificate, and the marriage was later annulled.

In August 2007, in a piece about Kelly’s oddball film project, Trapped in the Closet, Sanneh reported that Kelly was “giddier than ever.” Here, too, Kelly’s legal troubles are described backhandedly amid upbeat riffing on Kelly’s unstoppable talents:

Listen closely, and you can hear Mr. Kelly chuckling too. Ever since the appearance in 2002 of a video that the police say shows him with an under-age girl, his jokes have grown bigger and sillier. Maybe that’s an expression of his relief at the way his career has rebounded from scandal. Or maybe it’s an expression of his continuing anxiety about his forthcoming trial on charges of child pornography. (It is scheduled to start Sept. 17 in Chicago.) Or maybe it’s just a phase. If it is a phase, it’s an extraordinarily entertaining one.

The world was different in the 2000s; the Times’ influence in cultural matters was even more powerful than it is today. I watched the Kelly saga unfold at the time — I lauded DeRogatis’s reporting and charted the lack of coverage elsewhere in my blog, Hitsville. It was dispiriting to watch. Vibe magazine produced some original reporting on Kelly — the magazine produced the Kelly–Aaliyah marriage certificate, for example.

But otherwise I’m not aware of any publication that advanced the story, and most if not all followed the Times’ lead and referred to the details of the Kelly case elliptically. A review in Rolling Stone by another Times critic, Jon Pareles, of Kelly’s 2004 album Happy People/U Saved Me laid down a template: Kelly’s legal problems are mentioned in passing, and the overall tone is upbeat and positive. This review also agreeably takes at face value Kelly’s supposed religious side: “The songs … use gospel’s strategic buildups to sweep Kelly toward faith.”

When it comes to downplaying the allegations against the star, it’s hard to tell whether the Times was sharing the approach of other publications or setting a “let’s not ask too many questions” example that other outlets followed.

A then-major publication like Entertainment Weekly might or might not mention Kelly’s legal problems in its reviews — but even when it did, the disclosure gave readers little sense of the breadth of the allegations against him. I couldn’t find any serious coverage of the Kelly affair in Billboard; what is findable are reviews of the singer’s albums like this one, which doesn't mention the legal problems at all. It’s not hard to find other newspapers writing on Kelly and not even bothering to mention the charges against him, like this Boston Globe review.

You could read similar things in Pitchfork, the ultrahip online magazine. Here’s a 2010 review of the Kelly album Untitled, displaying the same hallmarks of Times coverage. The scandal is mentioned, but only in terms of Kelly’s triumph over it:

What a decade it’s been for Kelly — he’s thrived in a curious way, morphing from true blue 1990s R&B icon into an increasingly strange and beguiling pop culture oddball. He is known by more people now than ever, though not always for the best reasons. ... He released bold albums (Chocolate Factory), brave albums (Happy People/U Saved Me), and bad albums (TP.3 Reloaded). … He had sex in the kitchen, sex in the jungle, sex with your girlfriend. And on June 13, 2008, Kelly battled and beat child pornography charges. Which, to many, is all that matters now. But Untitled isn’t sunk by the vestiges of scandal…

By the following year, Pitchfork could review a Kelly album and not mention the allegations at all. It all created an atmosphere in which Kelly was a winner because everyone was calling him one.

So while other outlets gave Kelly a pass as well, it’s hard to imagine they could have gotten away with it if the Times had treated the story with the seriousness it deserved. Instead, its coverage was by far the most egregious of the time — set apart first by the sheer volume, and second by its unremitting enthusiasm and superficiality.

Indeed, as the 2000s went on, Sanneh’s drumbeats hit a crescendo. In November 2007, the Times sent him to Georgia to tell us that Kelly, embarking on a new tour, was “thrilling, hilarious, and downright mystifying, sometimes all at once.”

Today, in the #MeToo era, some of the things he chose to highlight come across as tone deaf, to say the least: “‘What happens in the building stays in the building,’ [Kelly] sang, softly and prettily,” Sanneh wrote.

Kelly’s legal problems don’t come up until the ninth paragraph of this review:

Right now, [Kelly] also happens to be a criminal defendant: He still faces 14 child-pornography charges in his native Chicago, stemming from a widely circulated video that reportedly shows him with an under-age girl. That scandal, which erupted in 2002, once threatened to end Mr. Kelly’s career, especially since his songs don’t make it easy to change the subject. He survived it in spectacular form, mainly by refusing to be cowed. If anything, his raunchiest songs got even more outlandish in the years after the report broke; what else could fans do but shrug and grin and sing along?

Here again, what Kelly does on that video is not described. (In fact, the Times barely ever mentioned the humiliating end to the video, even after it was played in court for jurors.) Instead, Kelly is described as having survived a scandal — in “spectacular form,” no less — that he was in fact still fighting against, and it must have pleased the singer and his PR team that the nation’s paper of record was characterizing it in that fashion.

In the review of the Georgia show, Sanneh went on to ridicule criticisms of Kelly. (“The local clergy was not amused.”) It reminded me of another aspect of the paper’s coverage: There didn’t seem to be any voices challenging the singer.

If the Times had wanted to balance the coverage out, the paper could have asked DeRogatis himself about what it was like to watch the tape that had been delivered anonymously to his door.

“[T]his is not Tommy Lee and Pam Anderson,” DeRogatis commented at one point. “It’s not fun and games. This girl has the disembodied look of a rape victim and he’s urinating in her mouth. It’s a sickening spectacle.”

I hate to pile up on Sanneh, but his Kelly fixation followed him even to the New Yorker, where he now writes. In a long 2009 profile of the singer Will Oldham, Kelly came up a few times; Oldham had even appeared in Kelly’s Trapped in the Closet. To Oldham, Sanneh wrote, Kelly was a “living hero.”