Regina Daniels, R. Kelly’s publicist for the last 14 years, resigned this weekend citing irreconcilable differences, and while surely only time willl tell how successful she was at crafting the R&B entity’s legacy, I’m gonna go ahead and declare that as far as taking impossible projects and molding them into names that merely make us laugh when they’re mentioned rather than frightened, no one has done a better job than Regina Daniels.

No, I’m not talking R. Kelly’s 26 Top 10 hits on the US R&B charts or his four #1 singles in 1996 or his three Grammy Awards in 1997 or the fact that “Trapped in the Closet” actually got made and then watched by human beings.

The true triumph of R. Kelly’s publicist lies in the fact that after numerous allegations of child pornography possession, multiple black-market sex tapes including one with a supposed 14-year-old and one involving urinating on a girl, marrying Aaliyah when she was 15 years old, allegedly sleeping with Gary Sheffield’s wife, and having his own wife take out a restraining order on him, when I think of R. Kelly, I don’t view him as a skeevy Joe Francis molestor type or as any kind of actual threat; I immediately picture him as this unreal cartoon that can’t possibly exist in real life and, thus, can’t actually do any harm unless it involves anvils or mallets.

By allowing him to walk into unsupervised publicity nightmares one after another, R. Kelly’s publicist has made it impossible for us to associate Kelly with one single mistake. Woody Allen had a relationship with the 22-year-old adopted stepdaughter of his ex-wife, and he became the butt of every talk show joke from 1992 to 1995; R. Kelly literally marries a fifteen-year-old girl, allegedly pees on another girl and tapes it, then releases a song called “Feelin’ On Yo Booty” and it sells a million copies. How is this possible?

Could you imagine how people would have reacted if Kevin Federline released “Trapped in the Closet?” It wouldn’t have even been ironically watchable. R. Kelly does it, though, and the public demands a sequel (with more audio commentary!) What if Nick Lachey married a 15-year-old R&B singer? He’d be Conan’s go-to “molestor” joke for the next ten years. R. Kelly can’t ever be that joke, though, cause he’s done too many other incomprehensible things to be tied to one specific joke.

All I’m saying is, if Regina Daniels is now available, Britney has a phone call to make.