NEW YORK: Sony Music has called it quits with embattled singer R. Kelly, ending his contract with subsidiary RCA after a documentary aired accusing him of repeated cases of sexual abuse, media reports said Friday.
While Variety and Billboard reported the breakup, Sony Music did not immediately confirm it when contacted by AFP.
One woman who sued R. Kelly, accusing him of sexual battery, knowingly infecting her with a sexually transmitted disease and false imprisonment, also says he has threatened her.
Women’s rights attorney Gloria Allred told reporters on Monday that her client Faith Rodgers, 20, faced “efforts to intimidate and retaliate” from Kelly after she filed the lawsuit now pending in New York’s Supreme Court.
And just after Rodgers testified in the documentary “Surviving R. Kelly” that aired this month, her lawyers say Kelly and his team created a Facebook page — which the social media giant removed within hours — seeking to discredit accusers including Rodgers, posting “private” photos of her.
But the singer of “I Believe I Can Fly” fame — who recently announced a new album — has seen his reputation more and more seriously hard hit.
Calls for a boycott gathered pace in some measure thanks to the #MeToo and Time’s Up movements and via the #MuteRKelly hashtag on Twitter.
Spotify announced in May it would drop the singer from its curated “playlists.”
The last straw was the broadcast in early January of “Surviving R. Kelly,” a documentary in which several women accused the singer and producer, 52, of having sex with girls under the age of 16, and of having surrounded themselves with women whom he made sex slaves.
Sony Music ends contract with US singer R. Kelly
Sony Music ends contract with US singer R. Kelly
- The singer of ‘I Believe I Can Fly’ fame — who recently announced a new album — has seen his reputation more and more seriously hard hit
- Spotify announced in May it would drop the singer from its curated ‘playlists’
Saudi stars on show at third Diriyah Contemporary Art Biennale
- Selected works from some of the local artists participating in this year’s exhibition
Nouf Al-Harthi
‘On the Red Sea’
Al-Harthi, who was born in Asir, is, according to the exhibition catalogue, “an interdisciplinary researcher, writer, and storyteller whose practice moves between sound, poetry, and music.” In a new commission for the biennale, she contributes this performance and poetry recital, which “focuses on sea sawdust, a type of marine bacteria that forms blooms during the hottest months.” As they decay, they turn from green to a reddish-brown, and it’s believed that the sighting of slicks of these bacteria is why the Red Sea is so named. In her piece, Al-Harthi uses sea sawdust “as a lens for deconstructing the relationship between human and non-human,” the catalogue states. “Reading the sea and the waves as sites of knowledge production, ‘On the Red Sea’ shifts our perspective through the biological and the mythical, weaving a network of envirionmental, historical, and linguistic relations.”
Ahaad Alamoudi
‘The Run’
The Jeddah-born multidisciplinary artist’s 2025 video features in the exhibition’s “Disjointed Choreographies” gallery, in which, the catalogue says, “artists grapple with their relationships to the past, celebrate the legacy of historical and cultural figures, and tells the stories that shape their world.” Alamoudi’s film shows a solitary runner “traversing printed banners that display static images of the very ground they occupy. As she runs through them, the land itself remains immutable and silent. The only sound is the steady rhythm of footsteps … amplifying both the futility and persistence of forward motion.” The video was shot in NEOM and “invites us to interrogate the narratives embedded in shifting lands — how symbols, screens, silences, and the cadence of sound shape our collective imagination.”
Leen Aljan
‘Takki’
The Jeddah-born architectural designer’s installation for the biennale is a giant takki board (takki is a card game similar to Uno) consisting of “modular, inhabitable forms made out of reclaimed wood from the tracks of the Hejaz Railway, which connected Damascus and Madinah. On the benches and tables are traditional folk games that are no longer played — or modernized versions of them.” The piece’s composition “echoes classical Hejazi courtyards and tiled interiors.” All of this ties into Aljan’s wider practice, in which she “investigates the intersection of cultural memory with sensory experience and spatial design.”
Mohammad Al-Ghamdi
‘Untitled’
This is one of three of Al-Ghamdi’s pieces on display in the biennale’s “A Hall of Chants” gallery, in which the works “map our complicated relationships to place and language.” The works are all mixed media on wood, and the catalogue describes them as “simultaneously contemporary and archaeological.” They are, it continues, “composed of reclaimed fragments carrying traces of social life, including a cable spool, decorative motifs, and a drawing on wood.” The artist is quoted as saying: “My work is not a nostalgic attempt to relive the past, but is rather an endorsement of the power of the past to create the future.” The works “invite viewers to witness the upheaval of matter and consider the enduring possibilities that reside within what is often overlooked, discarded, or deemed obsolete.”
Ramy Alqthami
‘Al Bitra’
The Jeddah-based artist’s work at the biennale is a collection of three photographs and a sculpture, created in 2014. Alqthami has “reconfigured a numbered concrete post — originally issued as a traditional marker of land ownership — into both sculpture and image” in the piece, which “originates in a personal history tied to (his) tribal roots in Saudi Arabia’s Taif region, where his family was assigned such a post to demarcate their land.” The post is the sculpture, while the photographs “point at its original location, shifting the marking stone from a local gesture of governance into a visual symbol.” It is a work that is supposed to invite a variety of interpretations, the catalogue states, “including as an instrument of power residing in the liminal space between ancestral knowledge and legal contracts.”
