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Courtesy of OWN As Iyanla Vanzant gears up for another explosive season of Fix My Life on Saturday, the life coach and television personality is also weighing in on the recent controversy surrounding R. Kelly and the Lifetime docuseries that highlights his alleged sexual abuse. Turns out Vanzant had the opportunity to put the singer on her show, but passed.
“R. Kelly reached out to Fix My Life, long before this documentary was ever done,” Vanzant reveals to ABC Radio. But she explains that she wasn’t able to offer the singer any help because he didn’t meet the show’s criteria.
“Are they willing? Are they ready? Do they have the capacity to do the work?” she says, ticking off the criteria. “He didn’t have… the emotional capacity. Just didn’t have it. And I knew, based on what I was looking at — the paces that I would have to take him through — it would have been brutal.”
But even though Vanzant says Kelly “hasn’t done the work” to fix his behavior, she doesn’t believe that sending him to jail will help him.
“I would never ever condone, or justify anything that he’s been accused of doing,” she says. “But locking him up in jail…it’s not the answer…he’s sick.”
Vanzant says to really “fix” the lives of everyone involved, there needs to be a “massive healing,” which would involve Kelly getting help and owning up to his wrongdoing.
“But what I do know is that, without some long term intervention, he doesn’t have the capacity,” she says. “Just wouldn’t be able to hear it, receive it…. Classic thing is that he’s not telling the truth about it…he’s still saying he didn’t do this.”
The new season of Iyanla: Fix My Life premiere Saturday, January 12 at 9 p.m. ET on OWN.
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