A former employee of America's current favourite alleged paedophile, Mr R Kelly, is suing the R&B star over allegations he beat him up in a dispute over song-writing royalties.
Henry 'Love' Vaughn claims that he was a long-time "mentor and guide" to Kelly and, more importantly, that Kelly's 2003 hit 'Step In The Name Of Love' was his idea and that, as a result, he had been promised half the royalties from it. He received none. But the incident at the heart of the lawsuit took place earlier this year, on 19 Feb, when Vaughn called by at Kelly's home. It is unclear if any argument about the royalties took place at that time, but Vaughn says that while at Kelly's house the singer and his entourage dragged him into a basement room where Kelly struck him "about the face and body with his fists".
Kelly's lawyer, Allan Mayer, has described Vaughn's lawsuit as "a pathetic collection of half-truths, distortions, and outright lies", denying both the royalty and assault claims. He stresses that police dismissed the assault allegations at the time of the incident because, he says, "there was nothing to them", while on the royalty claim Mayer says that Kelly has written some 2000 songs without ever using a co-writer, so to suggest he did so on this track is, he says, ridiculous: "To suggest that he needed Mr. Vaughn's help to write a song - or that he offered him any portion of his songwriting royalties - is ludicrous."
Kelly, of course, has been fighting allegations of making and possessing pornography featuring girls in their early teens, and of having sex with underage girls, for as long as anyone can remember (well, specifically since a video seemingly showing him having sex with an underage girl surfaced in February 2002, which is before the CMU Daily launched, so as far as we're concerned they've been around since the start of time). Some of the charges relating those allegations have, of course, been dropped over the years, more often than not due to technicalities. The singer is expected to face the remaining charges in court this month.