![]() ![]() Kelly rushed to the hospital thinking he was coming to meet a baby girl named Chase Monet. “I ended up naming her Joann the day she was born because when she came out, she looked exactly like his mom and I met him not too long after his mom passed away,” Andrea said. Andrea recalled that the two had originally agreed to name their newborn Chase Monet Kelly. In 1998, the couple welcomed their first child together, a daughter she named Joann Arielle Kelly, after Kelly’s late mother. This connection would prove dangerous for the couple’s marriage. Andrea said that watching her grandmother be helpless helped her relate to Kelly not being able to help his mother. God, love, and pain is what the dancer knew. ![]() ![]() “Robert’s behavior was not foreign to me because if the man of the cloth (my grandfather)-if he’s abusive, of course, a man of the world is,” she said. Still, her grandmother would get up the next morning and cook breakfast as if nothing happened, Andrea said. “The same man who would put his hands together and pray over breakfast was the same man who would have his hands around my grandmother’s neck,” she said. Having grown up in an abusive home watching her grandfather, a former Baptist preacher beat her grandmother abuse wasn’t foreign to the newlywed. “ It went from friendship to love.”įor Andrea, the news of his past connected them. “It was through him sharing his childhood and dealing with the illiteracy, growing up in a house and being abused, I got to see Robert and everyone else around us got to see R. “Like all of this information that he started sharing with me.” Not once, not twice, but three times by three separate people,” Kelly said. The early stages of the couple’s relationship were full of bliss according to Andrea, the two had become best friends.Īround the time he revealed his love for Andrea, Kelly opened up to his would-be wife about his dark past of growing up in a home where he was sexually abused on several occasions by his sister and the secret of being illiterate. “He said that I reminded him of his mom and that’s when he fell in love with me,” she said. “He said, ‘I opened up the door and saw you and I didn’t want to disturb you.’ “I had been sitting in the back of the tour bus reading the Bible, and he said the light was coming in through the window,” she said. In the beginning, Kelly describes the singer as charming, sweet, and with the best “momma jokes.” However, back then, she said, she wasn’t aware of the difference between “a charming man and a cunning man.”Īndrea recalled the moment she said Kelly told her he fell in love with her. Soon, Kelly and his backup dancer became even closer. From there, Kelly described her relationship with the singer as being intimate, but not at all sexual. One day, the energy between Kelly and Andrea changed. For Åndea, Kelly had said what he had to say and Aaliyah’s family had spoken their piece on the situation. Andrea said she and Kelly never discussed Aaliyah because she felt it wasn’t her place in the beginning. On Feb.7, 1995, Kelly’s marriage to Aaliyah was annulled. Kelly himself was married to 15-year-old singer Aaliyah. “Be careful what you say-three kids and a divorce later,” she warned with a knowing smile.Īt the time, Andrea was engaged and had no interest in building a relationship with Kelly besides dancing for him. Soon, Andrea noticed a change in the professional relationship with her boss. Kelly’s “12 Play” went on to top the R&B albums chart for nine weeks straight, while reaching the second position on the US Billboard 200 chart. Slipping off to an audition in a music video for Kelly’s first solo single, “Sex Me,” Andrea landed a job as Kelly’s principal dancer and choreographer in the same year he also got his big break with his debut album, “12 Play.” Years later, Andrea would be living her own dream as a choreographer and dancer. The former reality star-Andrea appeared on all three seasons of the VH-1 non-scripted series “Hollywood Exes”-and famed choreographer breathes dance, speaks dance and even used dance as a source of healing throughout her life. But while she will always be known as Kelly’s ex-wife, the Chicago native revealed she was so much more. ![]()
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