“Surviving R. Kelly: The Final Chapter” features a new testimony from Ebonié Doyle, who claims she watched a video recording of him “being intimate” with an underage Aaliyah.
When a producer asks Doyle if she was aware of his relationship with an underage Aaliyah, she remembers hearing people in Kelly’s inner circle “talking about Rob and Aaliyah,” and that she would regularly ask him what was going on between him and Aaliyah “and he would deny it.”
While on tour with Kelly, Doyle says she began to realize that there were certain physical similarities between herself and Aaliyah, and now believes she was “like a body double for her.”
Eventually, Doyle claims that while she was living at Kelly’s house, she found shocking evidence of Kelly’s preying on Aaliyah.
“I see this basket full of tapes, and I’m like, ‘Well, maybe I’ll just grab one of these tapes, and let me go in the other rooms and see if there’s a VHS so I can watch a movie,’ because I was bored,” she says. “That’s when I discovered that he’d been lying to me about Aaliyah.”
She continues: “The tape that I put in was of him and Aaliyah together. What I saw on that tape was he and Aaliyah being intimate. They were on the tour bus, and everything that I had asked him was confirmed on the tape.” (Kelly survivor/backup dancer Jovante Cunningham also says she witnessed him statutory-raping Aaliyah on his tour bus.)
Kelly returned to the house and, Doyle says, a confrontation over the contents of the tape ensued.
“He’s standing face to face with me like, ‘What were you doing?’” she recalls, as Kelly shook her, adding, “I was terrified.”
She says Kelly then “pushed me down the stairs.”
“That shake sent me down flights of stairs, and I just laid there. I just froze. That was the moment where I realized [how] to pick and choose my battles.”
The four-part finale to Dream Hampton’s docuseries will air on consecutive nights — Jan. 2 and 3 — on Lifetime.
