Tim sold cars at a Ford dealership while J. ran a small boutique in College Park, not far from Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport. They paid for Joy to record with a producer named T.O.N.E., sent her demos to record labels, and ferried her to auditions. “Me or him would travel with Joy so she was never . . . ,” J. said, and Tim completed her sentence: “. . . alone by herself.” After two decades of marriage, the couple often spoke as one in a quick rush of thoughts. Tim was more focused and matter-of-fact, J. talked fast and jumped from topic to topic, and both were very emotional. We spent hours talking, but eventually I politely asked to speak to one at a time. It was just too hard keeping up with both of them on speakerphone.
While J. worked at her store, she frequently played her daughter Joy’s demos, and in April 2015, a woman liked what she heard while shopping. The woman said she knew someone in R. Kelly’s inner circle, and she took J.’s contact info. Excited, Tim took the call from a man who said he was Kelly’s road manager. “Send me some pictures. Send me the songs.” The proud father did, and that resulted in an invitation to see Kelly perform at the Atlanta Funk Fest at the Wolf Creek Amphitheater on May 15, 2015, complete with three VIP passes backstage.
J. kept a close eye on her two eldest daughters as they snacked at the backstage buffet. The watchful mom did not see one of Kelly’s crew press the singer’s phone number into the palms of her daughters’ hands. Jai, midway through high school, threw away the tiny balled-up piece of paper. Joy, about to enter her first year of college, kept it.
A few days later, J. and Joy got another invitation, to fly to California to see Kelly perform at the Fantasy Springs Resort Casino in Indio on May 23. “When we got to go backstage with R. Kelly, we stayed there over two hours,” J. told me. “One-on-one with just me and my daughter and him. We went back to talk about the music. He listened to her CD. He was going to help her with her CD, and I was really impressed with him at first, because I have always been an R. Kelly fan.”
J. had heard about the accusations in Kelly’s past, but he genuinely seemed to want to help her daughter pursue her love of music. “I knew the history for the teenage girls who were sixteen, fifteen, fourteen, but I think in the back of our minds, we were thinking Joy could be around him if I was with her. It didn’t really hit home. Even with the Aaliyah situation, now that I think about it, ‘Age Ain’t Nothing but a Number,’ but you don’t think about that. You grew up with the song, and you like the song. I didn’t think about how he is really a pedophile who married a fifteen-year-old.”
After the second visit in California, Joy secretly began talking with Kelly on her cell phone. “As far as I know, we weren’t talking to him anymore. Or at least I wasn’t talking to him anymore,” J. said. She paid her daughter’s phone bill, and she showed me the call logs. Joy had taken a year off after graduating from Dutchtown High School in Hampton near the Savages’ home in the Atlanta suburb of Smyrna. She spent that year concentrating on her music and working at a Domino’s Pizza franchise, but in the late spring of 2015, Joy decided to go back to school. One weekend, according to her parents, Joy lied and told them she was making a visit to a nearby college under consideration. Instead, she flew to Oklahoma City on a trip arranged by Kelly’s personal assistant, Cheryl Mack.
Joy had sex with Kelly for the first time after he performed in Oklahoma at the Cox Convention Center on June 4, 2015, she later told her parents, her college roommate, and T.O.N.E., her friend and producer. Short and thin, with high cheekbones and long, flowing black hair, Joy was naïve, a trusting, optimistic, bubbly girl who was “young for her years” at twenty-one, my sources said.
Uncertain whether Kelly believed in her talent or just wanted sex, Joy came home from Oklahoma City and asked T.O.N.E. to record her on the phone with the star. “She told me she was nervous every time she talked to him, so she wanted to put me on three-way with them so I could hear the conversation to determine what he was really about, as in wanting to help her music-wise or sexually,” T.O.N.E. said. “Of course, the conversation turned sexual.” Recording third-party conversations without consent is legal in Georgia, and T.O.N.E. and the Savages shared that recording, which they said showed the predator at work. I’d never heard the singer in seduction mode, and it was as troubling as some of the videos I’d seen.
“I miss my baby,” Kelly said only hours after he and Joy first had sex. She chuckled. “I miss you, too.”
“What do you have on right now?”
“Um, the clothes I had. Well, now I’ve changed, actually. Some pants and a shirt. I’m comfortable here.”
“I want to know what kind of panties you got on.”
“Huh?”
“I want you to get in the habit of telling me what color panties you got on every day.”
“Okay . . . You want to know the color of my panties that I have on every day?”
“Yeah. Absolutely.”
“I know you like the black,” Joy said, chuckling at her allusion to the Black Panties album.
“You know, any panties would look good on you,” Kelly said. “I’m going to teach you how to flex them little titties. It’s going to be on. You seen how much came out of my dick?”
“Yeah, I did.”
“You made me come so hard.”
Joy tried several times to bring up her music. “I want to work with you on that song. Hello?” she finally said.
“Yeah, uh-huh. I will listen to that song and I will let you know. I’m more interested in developing you. New songs are not an issue. I always do hit songs. I always do great songs.”
“Right.”
“First things first. Gotta keep that character up if you’re turned out.”
Several of the girls I’d interviewed over the years, including Jerhonda, said Kelly used the phrase “turned out” with them, too. It can be heard as street slang for transforming a girl or young woman with minimal sexual experience into one who’s much more experienced, or a pimp controlling a prostitute.
Joy did not object to the phrase. “You know I’m on it.” Then Kelly scolded her for taking pictures of him on her cell phone, and made her promise she’d deleted them.
The Savages provided documentation of Joy’s travels to be with Kelly, some of it sent to them by his assistant Cheryl Mack, but they had no pictures of Kelly and Joy together after their first meeting backstage in Atlanta. Taking pictures broke his “rules.”
Joy enrolled at Georgia Gwinett College in Lawrenceville and started summer classes in 2016, rooming in the dorms with Torie Savode, then an eighteen-year-old nursing student. The two became fast friends. At first, Torie didn’t believe Joy knew R. Kelly, she told me, but Joy started putting him on speakerphone while the two flirted and had phone sex. Joy often visited Kelly at his two houses in Johns Creek, twelve miles from college, and she sometimes traveled with him to Chicago, Torie said. During the first few weeks, Joy always returned for her classes on Tuesdays and Thursdays, but by the end of the fall semester, she stopped coming back to the dorms. Torie said Joy missed all her classes and did not take her finals. The college confirmed Joy had dropped out.
The relationship had warning signs even before Joy left school, Torie said. Joy told her roommate she was one of six women Kelly housed and slept with, and the others called her “a prude” and picked on her. “Once, I left for the weekend, but I came back early to surprise her, and she was crying. I was like, ‘What the hell is going on?’ That’s when she told me everything.” Kelly had sent a cab to pick up the girls at his guest house and bring them to an Atlanta nightclub. Joy laughed when the male driver told a joke, and one of the other girls texted Kelly to report this violation of his rules. When Joy arrived, Kelly “bent her over and he whupped her behind.”
That wasn’t the only time Kelly got physical, Joy told Torie. “She told me that Kells beats them. I was like, ‘Excuse me?’ She was like, ‘He spanks us. You don’t know what a spanking is?’ She’s twenty-one! I was like, ‘Why is he spa
nking you?’ I said, ‘Has your father ever laid a hand on you?’ She said no. But when they go out, they’re not allowed to talk to any males. They’re not allowed to speak to anybody, or they get whupped.”
Kelly took the cell phone Joy’s mother paid for and “threw it into the lake,” Joy told her friend, replacing it with one for his use only. “She says that at night, watching TV, she has to ask if she can go to bed,” Torie said, growing more upset, and eventually breaking down in tears. “That does not make sense! They have to ask to go to the bathroom, when they want to go to bed, when they want to eat.” Joy’s appearance started to change; she began losing weight, and she cropped her long, flowing hair short, permed what was left, and dyed it blonde. She looked like a young male prison inmate. “I was like, ‘Why do you do that to your hair?’ And she said, ‘Kells likes it.’”
Almost fifty years old in 2016, Kelly ordered the women he housed to perform sexual acts for him, Joy told Torie. “There were threesomes multiple, multiple times—a lot of times. He makes them do stuff with each other, even if he’s not involved, and she told me he’s into that kinky stuff. He’s really into butt plugs, that kind of weird stuff. She doesn’t like it, but she’s doing it. She was crying when she told me. She doesn’t like it, but she won’t listen about leaving him. She won’t leave. It’s like she’s a robot. It’s like she’s brainwashed.”
Georgia Gwinnett College was thirty-five miles from the Savages’ home in Smyrna, and through the fall semester, Tim and J. only had sporadic contact with their daughter. Joy was busy, she was in school, she was making new friends, and it was all good, her parents thought. Then Joy stopped calling, stopped taking their calls, and stopped coming home to visit and do her laundry. Eventually she missed birthday parties, holiday dinners, her sister Jai’s high-school graduation, and even family funerals.
R. Kelly had followed Black Panties with a lackluster sequel in 2015, The Buffet. His latest album—and, as it would turn out, his last for RCA/Sony Music—had been 12 Nights of Christmas, released in time for the 2016 holidays. He appeared on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon on December 23, 2016, garnering a bro hug from the host who also tussled Donald Trump’s hair. Independent publicist Carise Yatter hyped the album by cheerfully quoting Kelly. “How am I spending my Christmas holidays? I’m going with the traditional, you know? I like to spend the Christmas holidays with my family and friends.” That December 25, Joy sent her parents a one-sentence text. “I hate Christmas has to be this way this year.” It’s one of the last times they heard from her directly.
J. closed her store and became a relentless amateur private detective. She reached out to everyone in her daughter’s life and Kelly’s former circle, and one person led to another, each adding pieces of the puzzle. The Savages also filed a missing person report with the Georgia Gwinnett College campus police, but I got the same response they did: The school couldn’t do anything because Joy’s parents knew where she was, and she was of legal age to go where and do what she pleased. A lawyer told the Savages he couldn’t help, either; they had no standing to sue Kelly.
J. and Tim also called police in Georgia and Chicago and asked for well-being checks on Joy at Kelly’s addresses. “DOOR OPEN/HOUSE CLR/NO ONE THERE,” Officer Michael Carter wrote in the Georgia police report, two days after Christmas, 2016. Police never returned to the guest house to follow up. A few weeks later, shortly before noon on January 30, 2017, three officers visited Kelly’s recording studio on North Justine Street in Chicago. Led by Sergeant Dion Trotter, head of the Child Protection Response Unit for the Cook County Sheriff’s Office and an instructor in its human-trafficking program, they surveyed the perimeter of the two-story brick industrial building, noting the iron bars on the windows and the video cameras lining the exterior. One of Kelly’s assistants came to the door when they rang the buzzer, then he summoned Joy to speak to the officers.
“JOYCELYN SAVAGE RELATED THAT SHE WAS FINE AND DID NOT WANT TO BE BOTHERED WITH HER PARENTS,” Sergeant Trotter wrote in his report. (Cops universally love all-caps.) “JOYCELYN SAVAGE FURTHER RELATED THAT SHE KEEPS IN CONTACT WITH HER MATERNAL GRANDMOTHER.” The Chicago sheriff’s deputies took no further action. “I’m gravely concerned about her,” Joy’s grandmother told my editor at BuzzFeed News, Marisa Carroll.
The last time the Savages saw their daughter, a few weeks before that text on Christmas Day, 2016, they attempted what they called an “intervention.” She’d told them she needed some things from home, and the whole family as well as Joy’s friend and college roommate Torie had gathered in the Savages’ kitchen when she arrived. Her hair shorn and dyed blonde, Joy looked like a boy in baggy gray sweatpants and a hoodie, but she smiled and dismissed everyone’s concerns. “It was as if she was brainwashed,” J. said. “Joy looked like a prisoner; it was horrible. I hugged her and hugged her, but she just kept saying she’s in love and he is the one who cares for her. I don’t know what to do. I hope that if I get her back, I can get her treatment for victims of cults, they can reprogram her, but I wish I could have stopped it from happening.”
When I wrote the first drafts of my story, I struggled with the words to describe the situation. “Cult” and “brainwashed” seemed bizarre, even melodramatic, but those were the words my sources used, and they were repeated by Georgia and Chicago police in the reports about their cursory well-being checks. I only realized months later that “brainwashed” had been the word Gerri Cruz had used fourteen years earlier, when she told Sun-Times columnist Mary Mitchell she thought R. Kelly “controlled” her daughter Andrea.
Tim Savage said he and his wife decided to go public with their story because nothing else seemed to help, and they felt as if they had nowhere else to turn. “It’s not about my daughter per se, it’s about all the girls,” Tim said. “The abuse that my daughter is actually enduring, nobody should go through.”
A few weeks after I began talking to the Savages, I also started speaking with the parents in Florida who J. mentioned in her first email. By then, the story Angelo and Alice Clary told me about their daughter seemed eerily familiar. Curly-haired, cherubic, and tiny, Azriel had the voice of an angel at age seventeen, many people told me, and when I watched her home videos singing opera as well as pop songs on YouTube, I had to agree. Music gave her strength and provided an outlet, but it wasn’t always enough. She suffered from depression, and in the spring of 2015, she tried to hurt herself.
The Clarys lived in Polk County, not far from Disney World. A construction manager who grew up tough on the streets, Angelo Clary, like Tim Savage, seethed with anger but stayed focused during our interviews. Like J. Savage, Alice Clary was excitable, but less scattered, and more hesitant to talk at first. Angelo decided to speak on the record right away, but Alice took a few weeks to reach the same decision. They disagreed a lot about how to handle the situation with their daughter. Both had some troubles with the law in their past, but their love for each other and their children was obvious, and nothing they told me failed to check out or lacked corroboration. Both used the words “so stupid” when they talked about how they felt about believing Kelly when he first told them he’d make their daughter a star.
“My thing was, I trusted,” Alice said. “I have never been in the music industry before, ever, and he is a lyrical genius. He is R. Kelly! And the fact is, he went to court, he was never found guilty, he was acquitted, and we were led to believe there was no truth in it.”
The Clarys bought three tickets to see Kelly perform at Funk Fest in Orlando during the Black Panties tour on April 18, 2015. They had promised to take their oldest daughter, A’lceis, but they didn’t want to leave Azriel home alone in her fragile state, so they took her instead. “During the show, they were pulling people out of the audience,” Alice recalled. “A guy said, ‘Oh yeah, her.’ He pulled her up onstage.” After the show, a member of Kelly’s crew passed Azriel the singer’s phone number. Her parents didn’t believe it was really Kelly’s number, and they got no answer wh
en they called. “Then I guess he must have got back later on or texted her later on,” Alice said.
The relationship between Kelly and Azriel developed over phone calls and texts she kept secret from her parents. “And then one day we were looking for her because she should’ve been coming home from school,” Alice told me. “Finally, we get a text message saying that she’s okay, that she had met up with R. Kelly in his hotel, and I’m like, ‘You met up with R. Kelly at his hotel?’” The Clarys rushed to the hotel and called Orlando police, who told them to deal with hotel security. They did, and their daughter finally came down to the lobby, but Kelly refused to talk to them. Angelo and Alice took Azriel home.
“After that, she was only talking to him when one of us was around,” Alice said. Like the Savages, the Clarys believed Kelly would help Azriel find a career pursuing her love of music. They vowed to be more careful. “We needed to make sure it was about music, because he was going to mentor her,” Alice said. “And then from there he wanted her to travel with him so she could see how the music game really was. We thought it could be an opportunity and that she was going to be with a guardian, a female guardian that would keep an eye on her.” The Clarys trusted that the guardian, one of Kelly’s handlers in the inner circle, would look out for their daughter. “So stupid,” Angelo said.
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