Dear Gossips,

Surviving R Kelly won Best Documentary at the MTV Movie & TV Awards broadcast last night. Survivors Asante McGee, Faith Rodgers, Lisa Van Allen, and Lizette Martinez were part of the team that took the stage to accept. 

R Kelly has been abusing women without consequence for over 20 years, despite tireless reporting from a few determined journalists, including Jim DeRogatis. As we’ve seen, in the six months since Surviving R Kelly was released, the docuseries has done more to dismantle his reputation than the valiant efforts that came before – because the survivors were willing to come forward, on camera, and tell their stories. On Lifetime…which some people criticised. Duana and I discussed this on an episode of Show Your Work back in January, arguing why Lifetime was, indeed, the right platform for this project, and not just because the series went viral immediately, putting a mainstream spotlight on R Kelly’s crimes in a way that hadn’t happened before. That could only be achieved with the right platform and the right team. 

Last week, Sasha and I were on assignment at the Banff World Media Festival. Our priority there was to moderate the Surviving R Kelly panel featuring survivor Kitty Jones, showrunner dream hampton, producer Tamra Simmons, and Brie Miranda Bryant, Senior VP of Unscripted Development and Programming for Lifetime. When I asked them why it had to be Lifetime, they told me that it’s because the network is by women for women. The Surviving R Kelly lead team is women, specifically all black women. 

It was Tamra Simmons, a young producer, who brought the project to Brie at Lifetime. Together they approached dream hampton to be the showrunner. It was dream who built trust with the survivors, giving them space to share their experiences without retraumatising them. And it was the survivors, like Kitty, who revisited their pain and made themselves vulnerable so that victims could be heard and understood. There were four women, of varied levels of professional experience, on that panel representing nearly every stage of storytelling, both in front of and behind the camera – that’s why Surviving R Kelly made the impact that it did; it was a direct result of this team holding up the model of inclusion and diversity that people have been advocating for. These are the stories that become possible. 

Yours in gossip,

Lainey