Author: Bob Chiarito

“There’s no way around it — South and West Side victims. The girls are all black except for one.” --Jim DeRogatis on why the Chicago media ignored the R. Kelly story for decades.

Jim DeRogatis, a Chicago pop music critic with a hard news background, almost threw away a fax he received the day before Thanksgiving in 2000. It was that fax–and not an anonymous videotape–that started DeRogatis on the trail of singer-songwriter R. Kelly, who was charged and arrested on Friday for sex crimes. The inaccurate videotape