*Veteran journalist Gayle King was praised across social media for her poise throughout her wild R. Kelly interview that aired on “CBS This Morning” earlier this year.
Kelly and King discussed the sexual abuse allegations leveled against him, and the embattled singer broke down during the interview, but King never lost her composure. “I didn’t do this stuff! This is not me! I’m fighting for my fucking life,” he yelled.
Months later, King appeared on “Desus & Mero” and revealed that Kelly inadvertently spat on her during his tirade, Complex reports.
“No one has done that to me,” King said about Kelly’s outburst (at the 3:20 mark in the clip above). “I never thought that he was gonna hurt me. But when he was [punching his hand in his fist], I thought he was going to accidentally hurt me. I was worried about that. You could tell he could hit hard. But he was spitting, it was flying all over the place, and his spit fell on my lip right here. I just sat there thinking, ‘I don’t wanna move.’ If somebody does that to you, you can gracefully [wipe your lip], but I knew I didn’t want to make any sudden movements because he was very amped up.”
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“I really feel like we were watching him have a breakdown in real time,” she added. “If that had happened to me when I was younger, I think I would have been very afraid. But I really wasn’t, because I didn’t think he wanted to hurt me.”
King chopped it up with the New York Times following her interview with R. Kelly, and she explained how she was able to maintain her cool throughout their heated discussion.
I could see it escalating, but I didn’t think he was going to jump out of his chair. Even when he jumped out of the chair, I have to say, I didn’t think he was going to do anything to me. It’s just that he was extremely emotional and extremely worked up.
The problem is when you get that out of control — the way he was hitting his fist and the way that he was cursing, the intensity of his voice — sometimes you can’t control yourself, so I just didn’t want to get hit accidentally. So I just decided, let me just sit here very quietly, and I would look at him to let him know, I’m not getting up. I worried that if I got up, that would say to him, this is over, this interview is over, even on a subliminal level, it’s O.K. to leave.
The worst thing you can do when someone is that emotional is to say, “calm down.”
R. Kelly was arrested in July on federal sex crime charges in Chicago and has remained jailed ever since.
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