00:00A big part of who you are today, like you spoke about your marriage, is based on what you survived in different relationships.
00:06We learn about a man named Southern John. We learn about your ex-husband, things of that nature.
00:13And then at one point we do hear and read about a time that you were in a relationship of sorts with R. Kelly.
00:20I do want to ask you, how did you find the courage to open up about your experience with him?
00:24Because, you know, there are a lot of people who are very much divided about R. Kelly within the black community.
00:30And so you never know what you're going to get when you open up about that.
00:33So how did you find the courage to speak about it publicly?
00:36Well, I feel like most of the people who are divided in the community about R. Kelly are people who hadn't experienced what the women of R. Kelly experienced.
00:47We're very clear on what we felt or what we went through.
00:51For me, it was all about me staying as true to my story as I possibly could.
00:58I felt like if I wrote this book and I left something out like that, then I was not doing my I was doing myself an injustice.
01:07I was doing the young woman who was going to read the book an injustice.
01:11I wanted to show the faces of and speak about the faces of all the men who had taken advantage of someone who didn't know any better at the time.
01:22Someone who had had a pattern of seeing themselves through other people's eyes of a girl who did not know her worth.
01:28And I wanted to make sure that was very clear in each instance.
01:32So I couldn't leave him out because I didn't leave Southern John out.
01:36I didn't leave anyone out.
01:37It's a full picture to explain the things that my mentality of a woman who didn't know her worth, of a woman who didn't love herself, of a woman who didn't have a voice, of a woman who didn't value anything that she had accomplished.
01:53And these are the relationships that I found myself in.
01:58No, I didn't necessarily cause some of the sexual abuse that I went through, but I did find myself with a pattern of men.
02:06And he was one of the men in one of the traps in those patterns throughout the journey of my life.
02:12So with me writing a memoir and it being about my life and my accounts and my point of view, I definitely wanted to make sure that I was honest and effective in my purpose of the book.
02:24And the purpose of the book is that if any young woman or man is reading it and they can see themselves and mirror themselves in any of the situations, maybe they would be able to sidestep some of the traps in life that I found myself in or sidestep some of the hardships or sidestep some devastating times and being able to tell my story.
02:49Hopefully it could help them.
02:54Hopefully it could help them.
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