It’s hard to remember this now, but when Aaliyah died, she was a superstar in the realm of Rihanna, Beyoncé, Nicki Minaj, and Cardi B. Kelly’s victims, some of whom started “dating” him as young as about 12 years old, and his ex-wife described harrowing accounts the consequences of their entanglement with the singer ranged from contracting sexually transmitted diseases and derailed careers to estrangement from their families and ongoing mental health struggles. Kelly aired on television, chronicling in heartbreaking, nauseating detail how Kelly groomed Black girls and women for sadistic emotional, physical, and financial abuse, wreaking harm and heartache on them and their families.
It would be nearly two decades before the 2019 documentary series Surviving R. I remember feeling both elation and sorrow as a new pantheon of Black girl celebrities emerged without Aaliyah among them. I could never bring myself to watch Aaliyah star in the film Queen of the Damned, which was released six months after her death. The grief that I might have felt upon Aaliyah’s passing was subsumed by 9/11-the fallout among my friends and family who narrowly escaped their demise that day, the intense Islamophobia and war that followed. That summer and fall of 2001, I watched the video for “Rock the Boat” over and over again the special effects of my beloved star and her backup dancers winding their waists in flowy costumes as they floated above the water were eerie, conjuring a kind of Black girl deity decades before the term Black girl magic had been popularized. If Aaliyah-a gorgeous, extraordinarily talented celebrity-couldn’t be protected from the overtures of older men, who could be? Who would stand up for or with me if I spoke up about my own experiences with abuse? The message was clear: Black girls, no matter how much fame they had achieved, were on their own. She seemed too smart, too beautiful, too famous to fall into the clutches of a sexual predator.Īs I heard Black folks in the media-both men and women-defend Kelly against this and other allegations of sexual harassment and abuse, my dignity and sense of safety withered. But Aaliyah was not just another girl on the IRT like me or my friends. Some of my friends had sexual relationships with boyfriends in their early 20s, and so illicit relationships of this kind were normalized.
An early bloomer physically, I’d been on the receiving end of catcalls and propositions from older boys and grown men in my Flatbush neighborhood for years.
At that point, I had carefully cut out photographs of Aaliyah and hung them on my bedroom wall with double-sided tape. I remember scrutinizing the fraudulent certificate in Vibe and watching the news reports about it on MTV News once cable finally reached our neighborhood. Aaliyah seemed too smart, too beautiful, too famous to fall into the clutches of a sexual predator.