Pallasch and I logged a lot of miles on the South and West Sides during the next month. We also rang doorbells in the black suburbs of Maywood and Bellwood, to the west, and in the south suburban village of Olympia Fields. As soon as people realized that the awkward, mismatched white duo on the porch weren’t cops, social workers, missionaries, or salesmen, they invited us in, and they shared stories about and photos of friends and relatives who they said had been wronged by Kelly. Not a single person seemed surprised when we asked about underage girls. Some were eager to talk, saying that no one had wanted to listen before. Often, I was able to break the ice by talking about music—Curtis Mayfield, Mavis Staples, Common, George Clinton, all people whom I’d interviewed and whose music I loved.

One night, we pulled up to an address on Devon Avenue, in Chicago’s Little India, on the Northwest Side. A source had led us to believe that the anonymous fax had come from “an older church lady” who had quit her job in Kelly’s office, disgusted by his behavior and frustrated that he refused to address “his problem.” We thought that we’d found her home during a search of driver’s records, but, instead, we found a Mail Boxes Etc. store. The next morning, the manager told us that we couldn’t leave a note because the box had been closed with no forwarding address. We later heard that the older church lady, who may or may not have been my anonymous correspondent, had left Chicago. We never did succeed in tracking her down. To this day, I don’t know for certain who sent the fax.

Abdon and I divided tasks: he called the lawyers and investigators, and I called everyone else, including all of the names on Hawkins’s witness list. Among them were two of Hawkins’s close friends from when she was fifteen. They were now in their early twenties and were willing to talk to me. One of them, Jovante Cunningham, went public years later, when she appeared in the documentary “Surviving R. Kelly.” The other, who attended Kenwood Academy with Hawkins, remains off the record to this day. Hawkins and Cunningham were members of a posse with Aaliyah that they called Second Chapter, and they all had big dreams of making it in the music business. With their help, and input from four other sources, I was able to piece together a fuller picture of what had allegedly happened between Hawkins and Kelly.

Hawkins enrolled at Kenwood in the fall of 1991. She took the bus most mornings from the neighborhood where she lived with her single mom, who was studying to be a nurse. She was starstruck when Kelly visited Lena McLin’s class. He was about to release “Born Into the 90’s,” and he sang a song in the classroom that day, just for them. A few weeks later, Hawkins and a friend saw Kelly cruising near the school in his luxury S.U.V. They waved him down and gushed about his visit to their class. He invited them to the city’s most prestigious studio, Chicago Recording Company, to watch him work. Hawkins began hanging out in the studio; after she had contributed to some of Kelly’s sessions, she believed that he would make her a star. One of Hawkins’s classmates said that she had sexual contact with Kelly before Hawkins did, when she was sixteen. She had seen Kelly “messing with” Hawkins, “playing with her breasts and rubbing on her.” Once, she had sexual contact with Kelly while Hawkins watched “and he played with her.”

The classmate broke down in tears several times when she talked about Kelly. “I’m gonna be honest with you—I still love R. Kelly’s music,” she said. “I don’t hate him. It’s a love/hate kind of relationship. He kind of reminds me of like a boyfriend who hurt you that you still love. I’m not trying to down him because, really, honestly, I think it has to be a sickness. The attraction he had to the girls I seen him with—he likes skinny, skinny, malnourished-looking little girls.” She paused again, sobbing. “Looking at the pictures of how me and Tiffany were when we were freshmen, we were ugly little girls compared to what he could have had.”

Kelly told both teen-agers that he would make them stars, the classmate said, but he added that, if they were serious about music, “You gonna have to be at the recording studio and not at school, because school ain’t gonna make you a millionaire.” Both she and Hawkins dropped out of Kenwood. “That was the biggest hurt to me,” Hawkins’s classmate said, “and to this day, I feel that I could be something else if I stayed in school.”

Other sources provided details about Hawkins’s settlement. A former associate of the singer said that it was agreed to the day after Hawkins gave a seven-and-a-half-hour deposition to Kelly’s attorneys, Gerald Margolis and John M. Touhy. The case file did not include a transcript of the deposition; although it was public record, the deposition had disappeared, and I never found it. A source said that it had been “hair-raising stuff about a predatory relationship based on perverted sexual acts,” including threesomes with underage girls. Demetrius Smith, Kelly’s longtime road manager and personal assistant, who had had a falling out with Kelly, confirmed this description. “That deposition told the story of their relationship and mentioned other minors,” with hours of graphic detail, he said. The sworn testimony stunned everyone who heard it.

In exchange for two hundred and fifty thousand dollars, Hawkins signed a nondisclosure agreement, barring her from talking about any relationship or settlement with Kelly. The Kenwood classmate believed that Hawkins had settled with Kelly for so little because “she just got tired of the case,” since it had dragged on for two years. She kept two-thirds of the money after legal fees, and she promptly squandered all of it, my sources said. “Tiffany just jumped once they started talking that money,” Smith, Kelly’s former road manager, added. But I always wondered if there was more to the story.

The Sun-Times published the first story by Pallasch and me on December 21, 2000. In addition to charting the course of Tiffany’s lawsuit, we revealed what had really happened with Aaliyah—a source had slipped me signed documents concerning both a settlement and the annulment of the marriage, which had been sealed by the courts in Illinois and her native Michigan. We also reported that Chicago police had been investigating Kelly for months, for sexual contact with another underage girl, the “goddaughter” mentioned in the fax. We thought that this might trigger a wave of new reporting, but no other news outlets forwarded the investigation. The loudest response we got was condemnation of our work from Kelly’s fans.

Two weeks after our first story, a videotape arrived at the Sun-Times via Federal Express. There was no note; the delivery slip claimed that it had been sent by me, to me. Whoever sent it paid cash at a drop-off center, a FedEx spokesperson told us; he couldn’t say exactly where it originated based on the tracking number, other than “somewhere in Los Angeles.” A two-and-a-half-minute clip showed Kelly receiving oral sex as he leaned on a counter set against a wall of rough-hewn beams. There was no time stamp indicating when the recording was made, and there was no immediate way of determining who Kelly’s sexual partner was, or her age. We spent two weeks trying and failing to learn more, and then we met with several of the paper’s top editors to discuss what we should do next.

The conversation with our editors was not especially lengthy or fraught with disagreement: we all agreed that turning over the tape to authorities was the ethical thing to do. We wouldn’t be betraying a source, because the anonymously delivered tape was evidence, not a source, and we had nothing to report about it, because we didn’t know what it showed. If it did depict an underage girl, it was child pornography, and the girl could be in danger. (We would also have been committing a felony if we held onto it.) Ultimately, investigators never identified the second person on the tape; her age and identity have never been reported.