R. Kelly Discusses Aaliyah and His Illiteracy.

R. Kelly opens up about a lot of personal things in his recent interview with GQ. R. Kelly talks about why he hasn't talked about his relationship with Aaliyah, his illiteracy, and his past cases of messing with underage women.

R. Kelly discussed how he has always had trouble reading every since he was a child and how he got picked on by his other siblings and being called dumb.

Who would have known one of the greatest in the music game could not read.

R. Kelly discusses how his reading has got better:

"Since my daughter showed me voice texts on my phone, I’ve gotten a lot better. I’m not a A student, I’m not even a B student, but I’ve gotten a lot better with the reading because of texts. And I can voice-text and say whatever I want to people. And then they text me back and I take my time and I can read through it. "

As a child, a family friend, a man, trying to persuade Kelly to masturbate him for money:

"It was a crazy weird experience. But not a full-blown experience, because it didn’t go down. Contact sexual—no. A visual—absolutely. A visual from him showing me his penis and all that stuff.”

Being sexually abused by a woman as a child:

"At first, I couldn’t judge it. I remember it feeling weird. I remember feeling ashamed. I remember closing my eyes or keeping my hands over my eyes. I remember those things, but couldn’t judge it one way or the other fully"

If he can relate to being angry about losing an innocence that shouldn’t have been lost:

"Absolutely, yes. It teaches you to definitely be sexual earlier than you should have, than you’re supposed to. You know, no different than putting a loaded gun in a kid’s hand—he gonna grow up being a shooter, probably. I think it affects you tremendously when that happens at an early age. To be more hornier. Your hormones are up more than they would normally be. Mine was"

If he was in love with Aaliyah:

"Yes. I would say I loved ‘liyah."

How he was ‘in love’ with Aaliyah:

"Well, there’s a lot of ways to be in love with a person. I was in love with my grandfather, you know. But yeah, I would say I was in love with Aaliyah just like I was in love with anybody else. But in a different, friend type of way"

Reports that he had a marriage ceremony with Aaliyah:

"Well, because of Aaliyah’s passing, as I’ve always said, out of respect for her mother who’s sick and her father who’s passed, I will never have that conversation with anyone. Out of respect for Aaliyah, and her mother and father who has asked me not to personally. But I can tell you I loved her, I can tell you she loved me, we was very close. We were, you know, best best best best friends."

He adds:

"Well, unfortunately when there’s two parties involved in any situation, both parties have to be respected. Sometimes you have to sacrifice yourself in a way to respect someone else’s wishes, and to respect someone else’s passing…. People can say, ‘Hey, well, he’s just trying to protect hisself.’ Well, I have nothing to protect myself from. I’m still successful, and I’ve got an album out now, I’m gonna move on after this interview and go to the next interview and do another interview, and these questions are going to be asked. I did the best I could by writing my book and putting it out there for whoever wants to read about Robert. [Aaliyah is not mentioned in Kelly’s book.] Can’t satisfy everybody, unfortunately. I wish that I could."

If it was R.Kelly in the video, with an underage girl:

[pause] "Because of my lawyers, to this day I cannot have those kind of conversations. Being advised by my lawyers in this."