‘I Was 14’: The Girl in R. Kelly’s Infamous Tape Says What Happened in ‘That Video’ Was Bad — But the Reason She Stayed Around Was Much Darker
The young girl from R. Kelly‘s shocking 2002 tape has broken her silence in a bombshell new interview for the very first time.
The video showed a girl who was 14 at the time in a leaked tape with now-incarcerated singer R. Kelly, born Robert Sylvester Kelly, performing intimate acts with her. The footage later became central to his legal troubles, leading to child pornography charges, though a Chicago jury acquitted him in 2008.
For years, the girl known publicly as Jane Doe remained anonymous before being identified as Reshona Landfair, 43, the niece of Kelly’s former protégé, R&B singer Stephanie “Sparkle” Edwards.
Edwards, who supported her niece’s early ambitions as a child entertainer, introduced her to Kelly when she was 12 or 13 and later testified at his trial that the tape showed her niece.
During a Feb. 3 interview for “CBS Mornings,” Landfair revealed why she repeatedly denied being the girl on the tape referred to as “that video,” despite several witnesses claiming it was her during Kelly’s trial and Sparkle reporting her suspicions about their relationship to social services.
In her new memoir, “Who’s Watching Shorty?: Reclaiming Myself from the Shame of R. Kelly’s Abuse, the now 41-year-old writes that Sparkle told her to sit on Kelly’s lap, rub his head, and ask him to be her godfather. She recalled thinking the “instructions seemed sort of weird since I hadn’t sat on his lap before. But I didn’t question it.”
“That is the start of, um, him entering into my life in a different way than just being an artist or hanging out at the studio,” she said in the interview. “It became more personable at that moment.”
Landfair admitted that she was “excited and mesmerized to be under his wing and a apart of his habitat.” She later added, “And even in moments where I despised Robert, I still lied for him.” But it wasn’t until after her 17th birthday that Kelly would inform her that a copy of one of the tapes was being sold around the world, which left her “embarrassed.”
She admitted, “I was trained and groomed” since she was 13 under “Robert’s brainwash,” but her parents did not agree with anything that took place.
In 2001, a sex tape showing R. Kelly performing sex acts on a 14-year-old girl was leaked, leading to many years of legal trouble for R. Kelly. Reshona Landfair was the girl in the tape.
She met the notorious singer as a teenager in Chicago – but soon after, Landfair says Kelly… pic.twitter.com/wkrHpD6Biv
— CBS Mornings (@CBSMornings) February 3, 2026
“He utilized me against my parents,” Landfair added. “Making threats of suicide and doing different things out of desperation to convince them to not turn on him.
Landfair regretted not telling the truth sooner. “That’s one of my biggest regrets, not telling the truth. But again, when I have been trained and groomed since I was age 13, I started believing the lies that I was telling. It was very foggy and unclear on what I really felt versus what was right or what was wrong. And even in moments where I despised Robert, I still lied for him.”
She added that his behavior seemed to get worse after the 2008 guilty verdict, as she began to understood she was “used and utilized for a purpose: to make sure Robert didn’t go to jail.”
But after seeing the Lifetime docuseries “Surviving R. Kelly,” Landfair changed her mind about staying silent.
“The spirit of conviction came over me during that moment,” she explained. “Somehow, I felt responsible that he was able to hurt so many more people. During that time, I thought maybe these were just sexual fetishes that he had with me. Maybe this was just abuse I was going through.”
Kelly was found guilty in 2022 on federal charges of producing child pornography and enticing minors into criminal sexual activity. In 2021, he was found guilty in New York for “Criminal conduct including sexual exploitation of children, forced labor and Mann Act violations involving the coercion and transportation of women and girls in interstate commerce to engage in illegal sexual activity.”
Kelly’s legal team denied the allegations in a statement shared with CBS Mornings. It read, “Neither Mr. Kelly nor his legal counsel have been provided with an advance copy of Ms. Landfair’s memoir. It is, therefore, impossible to comment on any specific allegation. Nor does Mr. Kelly wish to engage in any kind of refutation that would, in any way, limit the financial success of Ms. Landfair’s memoir.”
Landfair also told Rolling Stone magazine that her race played a role in how she was treated after the sex tape was leaked.
“If I were a Caucasian girl who got peed on, there would have been a different outcome. Everybody would have looked at things completely different,” said Landfair. “It wouldn’t have been no showing her body in a courtroom. It wouldn’t have been the skits and being the mockery of the town.”
“I’m reclaiming my name because I don’t want it to be a dirty word,” she wrote in her new book. “And my body because I no longer want my image reduced to a blacked-out face of an exploited child.”
Sparkle responded to the interview and claimed that any suggestion that she groomed her niece for Kelly was “untrue.”
“Any suggestion that I groomed, facilitated, or enabled harm to my niece is untrue and deeply painful, especially given my documented actions at the time and throughout,” she said in a statement.
Sparkle also reiterated that she was the person who called DCFS when she became suspicious of Kelly. The recording artist is currently serving out a 31-year sentence at the FCI Butner Medium I, a medium-security federal correctional institution in North Carolina.