“We allowed her to go, but we were kind of nervous about her situation,” Alice continued. “And that’s the messed-up part. She had been lying to us the whole time, and a relationship that was supposed to be about music had turned sexual.” The Clarys told me Azriel admitted she began having sex with Kelly in 2015, when she was seventeen, a year below the age of consent in Florida. “It’s a situation of this guy is very good at what he does,” Alice said, “and what he does is seduce people into being abused.” Azriel never came home from her travels with the singer, and the sources I developed said she became his “favorite” among the six women he housed in Atlanta and Chicago, “his number-one-girl.”
The Clarys tried to intervene to bring Azriel home the first time in late August 2015. They sent their oldest daughter, A’lceis, to Chicago, believing the Kelly camp would be more likely to trust her than two angry parents. A’lceis went to his recording studio on Ohio Street downtown; Kelly had not yet moved the Chocolate Factory to North Justine Street. She got into a loud argument when she started fighting with the star and his crew, demanding to see her sister. “You need to shut the hell up with all this noise. I don’t do drama. You’re making a scene,” Alice heard Kelly tell A’lceis when her older daughter held her cell phone up during the fight. Alice called the police. When CPD arrived at the front door, Azriel was no longer there. A’lceis came home alone.
The Clarys later filed a police report in Chicago, when a lawyer advised them that could help. CPD took no action. The Clarys said they also got nowhere when they tried to get Florida police to investigate Kelly’s relationship with Azriel, which began when she was underage. Polk County officers investigated but also took no action. After the Savages met for hours with FBI Agent Kelly Jo Strickler in Georgia, the Clarys talked to her at length, too. She wouldn’t talk to me and referred me to an FBI spokesman, who would neither confirm nor deny an investigation.
Like Joy Savage, Azriel Clary felt more comfortable talking to her father than to her mother, and he got a few calls after she began living with Kelly. In July 2017, Azriel said Kelly wanted to invite him to a concert in Indiana, where the two of them could talk “man to man.” Wary of Kelly’s motives, Angelo did not accept the invitation. Then Azriel told her dad some news: Kelly had recently paid for her to have breast enhancement surgery. The Savages later learned that Joy had the surgery, too.
“I am beyond furious,” Angelo told me. “I said to her, ‘How could you do this? What the hell were you thinking? What if you died on the operating table?’ I don’t even know what we can do anymore. I just know we got to get her home.” He paused and took a deep breath. “I’m filled with anger and rage,” Angelo continued, in a tone that convinced me I wouldn’t want to be on the receiving end of those emotions. “I do believe she has been brainwashed. She’s starstruck and believes he will help her do the things she’s dreamed about. But she’s not doing anything, not singing, nothing, and I just don’t know what we can do.”
For a long time, Alice didn’t want to act rashly. “I have read some tried to kill themselves because he no longer deals with them,” she said of Kelly’s girlfriends. “I desperately want my daughter back, but what will the repercussions be if she doesn’t come willingly? These girls think this man loves them.” She broke down in tears. “We’ve had deaths in the family, birthdays, and I haven’t heard from her and she hasn’t been here for any of it. I didn’t even hear from her on Mother’s Day [in 2017]. All I want to do is bring her home.”
The Clarys themselves tried again to bring Azriel home in May 2018. They flew to Chicago, rented a car, and drove to Kelly’s new studio on North Justine Street. There, they argued with two of his omnipresent security guards, who called Chicago police. The cops threatened to arrest the Clarys for causing a disturbance, they told me, and the officers would not take a police report or conduct a well-being check. Angelo said the responding officers seemed to know and were friendly with Kelly’s security. “This has got to end. They’re all in his pocket and nobody’s doing anything.”
CPD’s top spokesman told me off-duty officers are not required to report who they work for part-time, although they carry their badge and service sidearm. For years, activists for police reform have called this a recipe for conflicts of interest, and and it’s one of the rare criticisms in which they’re joined by CPD brass. Chicago’s powerful police union fights to keep the policy in place. I’d long heard some officers in Chicago and Olympia Fields worked security for Kelly, and department rules didn’t stop them from doing it or require them to tell anyone about it.
A few hours after their visit to North Justine Street, Azriel called her parents via FaceTime. She said she was fine and just wanted to be left alone. It was almost the same language Joy Savage used when she made a YouTube video telling her parents to leave her and Kelly alone. “Like they was following a script,” Tim said. “Yep,” Angelo agreed. In the FaceTime chat, Azriel said Kelly was the only person who really loved and cared about her. Then she wished Alice a happy Mother’s Day and hung up.
Three other key sources contributed to my first story about what a police report had called “THE R. KELLY CULT.” The singer’s former personal assistant Cheryl Mack told me a lot about her time working for Kelly and how she saw him mistreat the women he housed. Two of those women, Asante McGee and Kitti Jones, spoke to me for the first time about what they experienced while living with what they had also come to call the “cult.” All of them said they believed Kelly had a problem, and he had to stop.
Girls initially think, “This is R. Kelly, I’m going to live a lavish lifestyle,” Cheryl Mack said. “No. You have to ask for food. You have to ask to go use the bathroom. . . . He is a master at mind control. . . . He is a puppet master.” Kelly ordered the women he housed to dress in jogging suits because “he doesn’t want their figures to be exposed; he doesn’t want them to look appealing” to anyone else, she said. When other men entered the room, “he made the girls turn around and face the wall in their jogging suits because he doesn’t want them to be looked at by anyone else.”
A Tennessee native who juggled corporate jobs with freelance artist management, Mack met Kelly at the 2004 MTV Video Music Awards in Miami. Three artists she represented wound up having sexual relationships with the star over the next decade, she said. The first was an artist in her thirties. The second was a seventeen-year-old singer from Chicago’s West Side then living in Atlanta. Mack said Kelly took the young singer’s virginity, and when her relationship with him ended a year later, “she tried to slit her wrists on several occasions, and she drove her car in the middle of traffic in Chicago.” Other sources confirmed that story.
The young singer and her mother approached Susan Loggans. Citing attorney-client privilege, the lawyer who’d made a specialty of settling complaints by underage girls with Kelly declined as usual to comment, but Mack said Kelly’s attorney Ed Genson and manager Derrel McDavid “worked their magic to get [the singer] and her mother paid off, $750,000. This is what Robert told me. At the time, he was such a big hit for that FIFA Cup, he didn’t want the publicity, so he settled.”
After Kelly’s first trip to South Africa in 2009, he returned the next year to perform at the opening ceremony of the 2010 World Cup. “I see the light at the end of the tunnel,” he sang in “Sign of a Victory,” his newest anthemic single. “And I can feel heaven in its place.”
At Kelly’s suggestion, Mack paired the young singer she represented with a nineteen-year-old songwriter she met at an Atlanta club called the Twelve. “She looked like an Aaliyah. She had a beautiful voice and her potential in terms of being a writer was amazing.” The star began a sexual relationship with the songwriter after Mack began to represent her, Mack said, and the songwriter also became a member of the cult. “She looks awful. He dresses her up in sweats, threw her in a room, and threw away the key. She doesn’t write anymore. She doesn’t record any music. She does absolutely nothing. She’s a servant to Robert. It’s so sad.
”
Though Mack said Kelly’s behavior troubled her, she accepted his offer in mid-2013 to serve as his personal assistant. Like many before her, she thought she could change him. “I really, honestly, did want to help him. I felt like I was the one who was going to.” Though some of the women in the cult were in their twenties or thirties, Mack used the word “girls” because “Robert makes all of them dress up like little girls, just all kinds of little-girl outfits, barrettes and scrunchies and things like that.” He orchestrated threesomes and sometimes demanded the girls have sex with him in front of others. During one of those scenes, Mack said he told the young singer she represented, “‘If you want to learn and engage an audience, you have to learn it right here.’”
After a year and a half and a credit on the Black Panties album, Mack split from the singer in the summer of 2015. “I felt like I had enough. He was saying things like, ‘Cheryl was in control of my whole life.’ He did the same thing he did with Derrel [McDavid] and everybody else. ‘She was taking my money.’” Mack denied that allegation. She’d signed a nondisclosure agreement with Kelly, but she initially said she was not afraid to talk to me. She also sent me a copy of what she called her “book,” a five-page narrative PDF with names, dates, and incidents, almost all of which I corroborated.
“Maybe I should be scared, but I fear more for the girls,” Mack told me. Then, after several on-the-record conversations and a lot of forwarded documentation, she said she’d changed her mind about telling her story. She threatened to sue if I used her name in any story I reported. BuzzFeed’s media lawyers told her it didn’t work that way, and the story ran with the information she had freely shared with me on the record. As of this writing, Mack has not spoken publicly about Kelly again, but before she went silent, she confirmed that two other women had been a part of the cult. I connected with them after they, too, first spoke to J. Savage.
Thirty-seven when we first talked, Asante McGee grew up in New Orleans but had lived in Atlanta for a decade when she met R. Kelly and started a year-long sexual relationship with him that ended in the summer of 2016. A member of the star’s entourage invited her backstage during the Black Panties tour, and she and Kelly began exchanging text messages and phone calls. Early on, “he asked me if I was sure I wanted to be in his world, because his world is not like any other world. I was like, ‘Yes, I’m sure,’” she told me. She believed he loved her, and she loved him. “I used to travel and go to different shows and stuff, and he actually introduced me to the other girls” in the cult, including the woman he called his “trainer.” She was the same woman Jerhonda Johnson had met.
The trainer bragged of starting her sexual relationship with Kelly when she was fifteen, and of being friends in high school with Reshona Landfair. McGee watched Kelly having sex with the trainer, who was thirty at the time. “She entered one of the doors—you have to knock; you need his permission—and he told her to come in. He called her a b[itch]. He said, ‘B[itch], get down on your knees.’ She came in the room butt-naked, and she got on her knees in a dog position and he was just asking her questions like, ‘How long have you been with me? How many shows have you gone to?’ He was asking those questions and she was answering, and then he was like, ‘Okay, b[itch], get up,’ and he told her to suck his, you know.”
McGee never saw Kelly hit any of the girls he called his “babies,” but she did witness what she called other kinds of abuse for breaking his rules. “He left Azriel on the bus for like three days, and she was not allowed to come out.” He criticized her for not doing her homework, even though Azriel wasn’t in school. Kelly did not physically abuse McGee, but she said she did experience “mental abuse and sexual abuse. He would try to make me believe these things. He would try to feed your head with a lot of things . . . You want to satisfy him so bad and wanted his approval that you were willing to go to any level.”
Kelly took video of their sexual encounters, which surprised McGee at first. “When I saw the light flashing, it took me by surprise, and I was like, ‘What?’ He would put it on his phone, iPad, whatever is near, and he’d show his friends.” She said he orchestrated threesomes with her and another of the girls, and he demanded acts of “sexual humiliation that I didn’t approve of . . . I don’t care about your sexual preferences, but for you wanting me to do these things to you, I just couldn’t get with it. It bothered me.”
Those acts and the realization that her housemate Azriel Clary was only seventeen prompted McGee to begin rethinking her relationship with Kelly. “I have a seventeen-year-old daughter myself, and I think that was the biggest wake-up call. When I saw Azriel with him, it took me back. This could be my daughter. I just knew that it was not right, and I just couldn’t understand what a man almost fifty is doing having sex with someone the same age as his daughter. That’s when I realized it was more of a mind-control thing. He likes when you talk like a little girl. When Azriel was doing sexual stuff with him, he wanted her to sound like a little girl, so the whole voice would have to change.”
“Everything was building up,” McGee said. The end came after Kelly berated her for wearing shorts and a tank top instead of a jogging suit on a one-hundred-and-two-degree summer day. “In my head then, I’m gone.”
Echoing what Kelly’s friend Kim Dulaney had written years earlier in her book Star Struck, McGee concluded Robert was the sweetest person you could meet, but R. Kelly “was a monster.”
Kitti Jones told a similar story, but she said Kelly did hit her during a relationship that lasted from 2011 to 2013. “I was in a situation where I felt trapped. I gave up everything for that, and it wasn’t worth it.” As a radio personality with 97.9-FM The Beat in Dallas, she met the singer when the Love Letter tour played the Verizon Theatre in Grand Prairie, Texas, on June 19, 2011. Kelly gave her his number and they began talking and texting. Eventually, she quit her job to join him, lured by his offer to dance onstage as part of the threesome in the cell. Thirty-five at the time, she said she looked twenty-two. “That’s what attracted him, because he was really shocked when he found out I was a little older than I looked.”
Over time, Kelly introduced Jones to the other women in what she also called the cult. The first woman she met, who was then nearing age thirty, was Reshona Landfair. As in the past, when approached in 2017, Reshona declined to speak to me in advance of the BuzzFeed News article. “I asked him, ‘How long have you known ’Shona?’” Jones told me. “He said, ‘I don’t like people asking me my business, but I raised her.’ Those were his words.” Jones later sought out and watched the infamous video for which Kelly was tried and acquitted. “It registered to me at that moment what I was watching. That was the girl he introduced me to. She never stopped coming around the whole time that I was living in Chicago.”
Several incidents prompted Jones to leave in September 2013. “I got tired of the abuse and I got tired of feeling like I was just there whenever he needed sex. I had to put up with all of these things,” including sex acts that made her uncomfortable. “I was too afraid to share these things with friends and family that cared about me. I was really going through hell.” Kelly made her perform in threesomes with the other girls, she said, and he filmed their sexual activities. Then, in the spring of 2013, she and several of the girls ate with him at a Subway restaurant down the block from the Ohio Street recording studio. Jones claimed Kelly took offense when she chatted with the male cashier, dragged her outside, threw her against a tree, and kicked, choked, and slapped her.
“I couldn’t believe that he was bold enough to do that in open broad daylight in front of people. Sure, somebody out here knew it was R. Kelly, but maybe they didn’t think it was, because who would be that bold to do that if you’re someone people can recognize?” Jones endured other alleged incidents of physical abuse. She initially spoke to me off the record, only deciding to let me use her name not long before BuzzFeed News published the story.
Despite months of reporting with fourteen sources on the record a
nd extensive corroborating documentation, the story about Kelly’s cult proved more difficult to publish than any in my career. That period provides a case study of the troubled state of journalism circa 2017. I worked at length with three news organizations, all of which provided additional reporting help, and I got far down the line with editing, fact-checking, and legal vetting at each before executives above the level of the editors I worked with decided not to publish. Desperate to bring their daughters Joy and Azriel home, the Savages and the Clarys contacted me several times a week throughout that long wait. They started to give up hope that the media would amplify their frustrated pleas for help. At times, so did I.
I spent a month doing my initial reporting after J. Savage first emailed me on November 2, 2016. Then I contacted Jessica Hopper, who’d interviewed me about R. Kelly’s troubled history for the Village Voice. She had become executive editor at MTV News, and on December 6, she agreed to publish the story once we finished it. The broadcast channel had long since replaced music videos with reality-TV trash such as The Real World and 16 and Pregnant, but one of its rotating corporate regimes had decided to create a forum for long-form cultural journalism and criticism online. Eventually, Hopper hit roadblocks with the corporate overlords at Viacom Media Networks. They wanted to break the story in a half-hour documentary, and the legal department balked at indemnifying a freelance reporter.
“Every part of it had hit a snag that I wasn’t positive I could untangle,” Hopper later told me. “That’s when I said, ‘Go ahead and walk with it.’ I felt horrible.” She left MTV four months later.
Editor Jake Malooley had been asking me to contribute to the Chicago Reader, and his deputy Robin Amer had been a colleague at WBEZ. The alt-weekly had recently published a long investigative story about sexual harassment at the vaunted Profiles Theatre, shaking the Chicago theater scene. The Reader was owned at the time by Michael Ferro, a digital entrepreneur with a short attention span and grandiose visions who’d purchased the Sun-Times after James Tyree died in 2011. Publisher and editor in chief Jim Kirk, a veteran of the Chicago Tribune, oversaw both papers, and the Sun-Times had of course published all of the original reporting about Kelly that I did with Abdon Pallasch. I met with Amer, Malooley, and Kirk in the same conference room at the new Sun-Times offices at 350 North Orleans where I’d been told I had three options the night before I appeared in court during the trial.
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