Mr. DeRogatis worked with three separate media outlets on the story, each of which progressed far along the editing process before dropping out. After the last outlet canceled, on a Wednesday afternoon in July 2017, Mr. DeRogatis contacted Shani O. Hilton, the vice president of news and programming at BuzzFeed News, who accepted the piece. It was edited, fact-checked and given a legal review in four days.
“He literally FedExed all of his boxes of evidence, his tapes, his transcriptions,” Ms. Hilton said.
That article, published the next Monday at nearly 5,000 words, and several others that followed spawned an activist hashtag, #MuteRKelly, that called for Mr. Kelly to be dropped by his label, RCA, and by streaming services like Spotify and Apple Music.
His BuzzFeed stories also led to Kreativ, a television production company that has a deal with Bunim/Murray Productions — the reality-TV giant behind shows like “Keeping Up With the Kardashians” — to begin laying the groundwork for the documentary. Interviews with victims and family members who had been identified through Mr. DeRogatis’s reporting were lined up.
After selling the project to Lifetime, the producers approached Ms. Hampton, who said that at first, the Bunim/Murray association turned her off.
“They said they were approaching this very seriously and wanted to center these black girls,” Ms. Hampton said. “I took off my sunglasses and stopped eating my sushi and all of a sudden took this meeting very seriously.”
Ms. Hampton, 47, joined the project in February 2018, as showrunner and executive producer, and her involvement immediately gave it credibility. As a hip-hop journalist in the 1990s, she developed a reputation as both an insider and a cutting critic of the culture’s shortcomings. She developed close friendships with the Notorious B.I.G. and Jay-Z, yet called out Dr. Dre and other rappers for violence against women.
Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/29/business/media/r-kelly-jim-derogatis-dream-hampton.html?partner=rss&emc=rss
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