Somehow, someone at GQ managed to get R. Kelly to speak on the very issues that he’s been avoiding since, well…forever. You can check out the full interview here — titled Confessions — and we’ve included some notable excerpts below:

In [R. Kelly’s] book, he describes a number of premature sexual experiences, including an approach by a trusted family friend, a man, who he says tried to persuade Kelly to masturbate him for money, which Kelly says he rebuffed. “It was a crazy weird experience,” he tells me. “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.” But he describes in his memoir how the full-on sexual abuse that lasted for several years (it was oral sex the first time, though he tells me it soon became intercourse) started one day when Kelly fell asleep in front of the TV and was awoken from “a crazy dream about Three’s Company” to find a woman playing with him:

I tried to push her away, but she wouldn’t stop until she was finished. When she was, she said, “You better not say shit to no one or else you gonna get a terrible whupping.

First I ask Kelly what he saw in Aaliyah musically when he started working with her.

“Aaliyah? I heard first of all this soft voice, but very…a lot of charisma. And I saw her as a star the minute I heard her sing and dance. Saw her dance. She wasn’t the greatest dancer, but the dance moves she was doing were different than the other dancers that I’ve seen on television. And I said, ‘This girl’s gonna be a star, whether I work with her or not.’ ”

Obviously the two of you became very close.
“Yeah. Yeah.”

How would you describe that?
“Uh, I would describe it as best friends. Deep friends. As far as we both loved music and wanted to be successful. She’s a Capricorn, I’m a Capricorn, my momma a Capricorn, her daddy’s a Capricorn, you know. It was just so much in common with each other.”

And these are difficult questions but would you say you were in love with her?
“Yes. I would say I loved ‘liyah.”

But “in love”?
“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.”

And she was in love with you?
“I would think so. Absolutely. I would say that.”

Sure. But let me ask a simple question: Is that you in that video?
“[pause] Because of my lawyers, to this day I cannot have those kind of conversations. Being advised by my lawyers in this.”

Given that a lot of people believe that the video shows you, some of the behaviors on the video have become associated with you, particularly urination as part of sex. Pissing on people. You must have seen that Dave Chappelle skit.
“No, I haven’t.”

He did several clips on his show.
“David Chappelle? [as though trying to place the name] David Chappelle? I don’t…”

Chappelle’s Show. Very famous.
“Okay…comedian?”

Really famous comedian.
“Okay, a comedian. Okay…go on.”

And acting as you, he did a parody of “Ignition (Remix)” called “Piss on You.”
“Mmmm.”