I recently watched
Surviving R. Kelly describing the tactics used by the now incarcerated singer to groom and abuse his victims, and what caught my attention was the similarities between both R. Kelly's and Tate's cases.
The first one is their choice of women: submissive, doing what they're told, responsive to guidance. There's nothing wrong with that in principle, but there's a difference between wanting traditional/conservative relationship dynamics (as opposed to a modern/liberal one) and looking for someone who's easy to manipulate.
In one episode the narrator of the docuseries descries how such grooming works in practice: when in a group of women certain covert commands are given that on the surface seem to be innocent requests for a favour, such as fetching something, but then they get more and more pushy. Women who respond to this and obey are then identified as potential targets. And when watching that part of the series I was reminded of a video I once bumped into on YouTube where Tate was taking part in a podcast and he acted in a similar way towards one of the girls there. E.g. putting his finger on his mouth and signalling to her to be quiet and she obeyed despite the fact that she was actually quite loud and mouthy before he zoomed in on her.
Then there are his claims that apart from the initial accusers (whom he calls liars) there have been no other women who have come forward to testify against him. In the video posted above by The Mechanic he makes this claim too, saying that thousands of women he knows have been approached and/or interrogated, but none of them chose to press charges. But if R. Kelly's story is anything to go by, that doesn't necessarily mean he's innocent. R. Kelly was able to avoid getting caught despite running what amounted to a sex cult for decades.
The fact that there are no women coming out against him reminds me of another part of
Surviving R. Kelly: firstly, a lot of them had been paid for their silence in exchange for an NDA over the years prior to his final arrest. His lawyer took care of that. Secondly, back in 2019 when the singer was formally accused for the final time, two of his victims went on national television to publicly defend him, state that there was no abuse involved, they were with him willingly, and that their parents were liars, kicking up a fuss and wrongfully accusing R. Kelly to make money out of it. Here's the interview where they say that:
Kind of reminds me of this statement from a woman whom Diicot put on the file at Tate's victim:
And coming back to R. Kelly's 2019 "defenders", they later detailed his abusive behaviour, admitted that they were brainwashed into normalising his abuse, and coached to say what they said back in 2019. Here are their testimonials:
Another thing is that Tate's army of defenders keeps repeating that those women were always able to leave, that no one kept them there against their will. But walls and locks may have been emotional and mental rather than physical, because in both cases the victims were in love with their abusers. Tate has said in his interviews that his girlfriends weren't allowed out, but they didn't even want to leave the house anyway.
In
Surviving R. Kelly, one of the girls' mother manages to track her daughter's whereabouts after a few years of no contact. She comes to the hotel the daughter is staying at to get her out, but the girl doesn't want to go. The mother eventually manages to convince her and they both leave. But after a short while the girl went back to R. Kelly again. She came back to her mother on her own a short while later telling her that the previous time she hadn't really made her own decision to leave. She wanted to go back to R. Kelly to finally make the decision for herself. So she wasn't locked up there if she could come and go like that - and neither are Tate's webcam girls.
Another similarity is the fact that R. Kelly's victims said that all that abuse seemed normal to them while they were there. That he was very good at normalising what he was doing to them. Which was easy to do given that they had little-to-no contact with the outside world and their families, and hardly any life experience since they usually met him when they were still teenagers (both Tate brothers have a strong preference for very young girls, often teenagers). I'm not sure how real this is but,
someone shared allegedly leaked messages between one of the girls who triggered the investigation and her parents. I guess it may or may not be genuine, but the fact that the victim mentions presence of other girls who were there to normalise taking clothes off on camera caught my attention.
