3. Their Marriage Was Annulled in 1995
Kelly and Aaliyah tried to keep their marriage a secret, but word soon got out. The Chicago Sun-Times reports that Aaliyah’s family was outraged when they learned the news, and demanded she get an annulment right away. Their marriage, and their subsequent working relationship, came to a close in 1995.
Their union reentered the public eye in 1997, however, during Kelly’s court battle with a woman named Tiffany Hawkins. Aaliyah filed suit in Cook County, successfully sealing all her records relating to the marriage. When asked about her decision, the singer told The Sun-Times “I don’t really comment on that because I know that’s not true. When people ask me, I tell them, `Hey, don’t believe all that mess. We’re close and people took it the wrong way.’ ”
A spokesperson for Aaliyah’s record label, Virgin Records, added “When R. Kelly comes up, she doesn’t even speak his name, and nobody’s allowed to ask about it at all.”
In a 2014 interview on the Ryan Cameron Morning Show, Aaliyah’s cousin Jomo Hankerson revealed that the singer had trouble maintaining her career after the controversy:
What was surprising to me was that after it all, Aaliyah got villainized. That’s the part that I never understood. That’s what made the transition to the second album difficult. It was hard for us to get producers. We were coming off of a multi-platinum debut album and except for a couple of relationships with Jermaine Dupri and Puffy, it was hard for us to get producers on the album. She was 16, 17 at the time.
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