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Lifetime announces dates for two more Surviving R Kelly documentaries
By Chris Cooke | Published on Thursday 12 December 2019
US TV network Lifetime has confirmed that next month it will broadcast ‘Surviving R Kelly Part II: The Reckoning’, following on from last year’s headline grabbing documentary series about the many sexual abuse allegations made against the pop star.
Those allegations were hardly new when Lifetime aired the original ‘Suriving R Kelly’ programmes last January. But the series had a major impact, with many of Kelly’s business partners quickly breaking their ties with the star, or publicly announcing they’d stopped working with him already.
Then the criminal investigations began into allegations made by multiple women, both in the programme and elsewhere. Kelly was subsequently arrested and denied bail. He remains in jail awaiting trials in both Chicago and New York, with a further trial in Minnesota also set to take place.
Lifetime will present two more programmes about the controversy on 3 and 4 Jan. The first will look at the immediate impact of the original airing of ‘Surviving R Kelly’ (something Lifetime actually did in an earlier follow-up programme in May) and document events over the last year.
The second will feature a series of interviews with music industry execs, legal people involved in the case, and some of the women who have accused Kelly of abuse. It will also speak to Jim DeRogatis, the American journalist who wrote for years about the allegations against Kelly and the secret legal settlements with the star’s alleged victims.
As well as all that, the broadcaster also adds that new accusations will be made against the singer during the new programmes. Kelly, of course, continues to deny all of the allegations that have been made against him.
Following the announcement of ‘Part II’, Kelly’s ex-wife Drea told TMZ that she plans to sue Lifetime after she was included in the trailer promoting the new programmes. She says it misleads audiences to think that she was involved in them, which she says she was not.
She is not supporting her former husband, but says that she received a negative backlash after the original show aired and is angry that producers did not, as she sees it, offer the correct support for her and other women who took part in the series after it was shown.
