Endless Thread - Bonus: R. Kelly Vs. The Savages

Episode Date: January 16, 2019

The release of Lifetime's 6-part documentary series "Surviving R. Kelly" has sparked new conversations about the R&B singer -- at the water cooler, on social media, and of course, on Reddit. This episode comes to us from WBUR's "Edge of Fame" podcast, who spoke to a family that claims R. Kelly is holding their daughter hostage. It includes some upsetting details, so discretion is advised.

Produced by the I-Lab at WBUR, Boston. Hey, endless threadheads. I know it's not your usual day to get something in your feed, but some of you may have heard about this new lifetime documentary, Surviving R. Kelly. It's a six-part series that shares the stories of dozens of women and people in the music industry who either witnessed or survived R. Kelly's alleged abuse,

pedophilia, and predatory behavior. The documentary is sparking new conversations. conversations about R. Kelly, at the water cooler, on social media, and of course, on Reddit. Uncomfortable conversations. Ben, I found a post on the Black Ladies subreddit the other day that asked why people still support R. Kelly, despite the allegations. And the original poster wrote, someone make it make sense. I don't even really know how to look at people when they defend him. And the comments on this thread were fascinating, but they were also pretty tough to read. So here's one that says, Because if people hold R. Kelly accountable, they'd have to hold the men in their families and lives accountable as well. Glasshouses rarely want to throw stones, even if the stones are well deserved.

Here's another one. I think it's also ingrained in us that we have to defend black men because historically they've been unjustly crucified, even if that means going against our own best interests. I feel like one person kind of boiled it down. They said that people support. court him basically because they like his music. Quote, a lot of folks can justify a lot of stuff if the bad thing brings them something they like. Hmm. So on the one hand, it feels like there's this new conversation starting around R. Kelly and on the other, as the surviving R. Kelly Lifetime documentary shows, people have known about these allegations for decades.

And last May, our colleagues from another WBUR podcast, Edge of Fame, took a close look at the R&B singer through the lens of a family who claims that R. Kelly is holding their daughter captive. We wanted to share that episode with you now. And just a heads up, it contains some upsetting details. So please use discretion. Okay, here's the show. I wish you, too. What do you have all right now? Some pains in a shirt. That's R. Kelly, R&B superstar, talking with then 19-year-old Joycelyan Savage back in 2015.

That's when things were different, when her parents still knew where she was. You're a good kiss, sir. You're a good kiss, sir. I'll teach you some things, but I love one. Joycillin's parents, Tim and John Gillen Savage, say their now 22-year-old daughter is being held captive by one of the biggest names in R&B, a Grammy winner who has sold more than 50 million albums.

This phone tape, provided by the Savages to the Washington Post, was recorded by their daughter and a friend. I used to have a phone. Yes, I am. The savages say they haven't been able to see Joyselin. They haven't been able to call her, and they don't know what's happening with her at R. Kelly's studio, his various addresses, and when she's on the road with him.

Joycelin is one of several live-ins, women he keeps around full-time. The savages say they've only had two short phone conversations with their daughter in the past 16 months. Here's Tim. We don't have no proof of life. And when you understand you have no proof of life, that's just like burying somebody in the ground. Robert Sylvester Kelly is a pop hitmaker.

He's worked with everyone from Michael Jackson to Jay-Z, and he still plays in massive arenas across the country. But he's also been followed by rumors and lawsuits for decades, accusing him of having sexual relationships with teenage girls, some of them as young as 14. He's also been called controlling and abusive by a group of women who once were involved with them. The media outlet BuzzFeed went so far

as to describe his live-in entourage of young women as a sex cult. He has strongly denied any wrongdoing. Early Friday, hours before we were set to publish, his management team sent the following statement, quote, R. Kelly has close friendships with a number of women who are strong, independent, happy, well cared for, and free to come and go as they please. All of the women targeted by the current media onslaught are legal adults of sound mind and body with their own free will.

This is not the first time Kelly has faced these questions. Back in 2008, these allegations were so well known that journalist Tere asked him about them in an interview on BET. Do you like teenage girls? When you say teenage, how old are we talking? Girls who are teenagers. Here's the background. In 1994, when Kelly was 27, he married the singer Alia. She was 15 at the time, and reports say Kelly's tour manager helped her get a fake ID

so she could get married without her parents' consent. The wedding was later expunged, and neither starred talked publicly about the marriage, and Alia later died in a plane crash. A couple of years later, he was sued by Tiffany Hawkins. She said that she and Kelly began having sex when she was 15. The case was settled out of court. Over the years, there have been at least four other settlements, anonymous tips, and a sex tape which allegedly was made with a 14-year-old.

He actually went on trial for that, charged with child pornography, but was found not guilty in 2008. And the latest allegations? That Kelly is holding women against their will. He denies all of this and says the women he lives with now are there voluntarily. But that's not what Joycelin Savage's parents say. Her parents have struggled as her calls to her go unanswered. They say it can be torturous, particularly when their phone rings and it's R. Kelly himself,

and he won't put Joyce on the phone. I talked to Mr. Kelly on March the 1st of 2018, you know, and he told me that trust the process. to see my daughter. How can you tell a father that haven't seen his daughter in over two years to trust the process? You need to tell me to trust the process to see my own baby girl. It's hurting. So how did this happen? How did Tim and John Gillesand Savage lose their daughter to R. Kelly?

I'm Washington Post National Arts Reporter Jeff Edgers. And from The Post and WBUR in Boston, this is Edge of Fame. If you've listened to our podcast before, you'll realize this episode is a departure from our usual. But I felt it was an important story to share with you. I've spent the past five months reporting on R. Kelly, trying to understand how such a talented, successful artist could go from chart-topping hitmaker to a man dog by such horrific accusations. You can read our report on the industry enablers who turned to blind-eyed art,

R-Kelly on the Washington Post at wapo.st. slash R. Kelly. In this episode, we're focusing on one Atlanta family at the center of the latest wave of allegations. Come on, Jory. Tim Savage, a 44-year-old entrepreneur, is in the middle of an all-day prom-dress shopping trip for his second daughter, Jay, who is about to be 18.

His third daughter, Jory, who is 11, and his wife, John Gulen, who's 43, are in the car. They're all wearing matching shirts that are printed with Jay Savage in either gold or silver letters. Their family is their brand. Jay hasn't forgotten about today's mission. And we're going to hopefully find a dress here, and it's called RSVP Prime.

Yeah. What are you hoping to get from there? A beautiful, long, two-piece, even champagne, black, black, white, or red dress. I wanted to be mermaid with a two-piece set, poopie at the bottom. Oh, and I should mention, Tim, Jay's dad, has a camera rolling the whole time.

The savages are working on several projects. They just did an interview for Dr. Phil, which hasn't been released yet, and they're working with the Lifetime Channel on a documentary. And Tim is working with Jay, booking her studio time because she, like her older sister, is interested in singing.

As she looks at dresses, Tim prompts Jay to talk about Joyselen while he films, starting with whether she misses her big sister. She'll be probably out here picking a whole bunch of dresses out for me and making me try on all of them, and I'll probably be here for all day, knowing her. But this one's pretty, though. I like it. No success on the dress front, so they're back in the car. Now turn right.

After a while, memories of Joycelyan's prom come up. Jay describes Joyselen's date. That was Joycelin's type, okay? I don't know what's going on with her now, but the guy who she went to prom with, that was a gentleman. He was her age. She's now with R. Kelly.

He's 51. Here's how it started. Joyce Lynn was 19 back in 2015 when Mom Jongelin met someone who knew R. Kelly's manager. Johngeline says that she and her daughter got to meet R. Kelly backstage at a concert that May in Atlanta.

She claims that he then flew them out to California for another gig. Joyce Lynn wanted to make it as a singer and was looking for some kind of big break. To Jongelin, Art Kelly seemed nice, respectful, and gave her daughter, Joycelin, music advice. My daughter was excited about being able to meet him and him possibly talking about taking her on as a prodigé for her career. I mean, he did compliment my daughter as well as myself on and we were attracted for whatever. But, you know, I brushed it off.

You know, he is kind of like, I guess, a rare charismatic. The savages say they later sent their two oldest daughters to a concert with one of Kelly's associates, and that the associates slipped Joycelyn Kelly's number. They also claimed that Joycelyn and Kelly began talking without her parents' knowledge. Tim says that Joycelyn claimed she was going on a weekend trip to a college in Georgia, but instead was flown to Oklahoma City to spend time. with Kelly. It was then one month after their first meeting that R. Kelly and Joycelain had sex

for the first time her parents say. She started college a year later in 2016, but by December that year, Joycelain left college. Her parents say that she moved in with Kelly and stopped answering their phone calls. At this point, let's consider the world Joycelyn Savage entered when she moved in with Kelly. My sources, including former staffers, text messages, court documents, and six women who are willing to go on the record with their names, detailed the system Kelly put in place to protect himself from the outside world. It really is a wall, a wall between his sex life and his pop life. He has a group of live-in sex partners, anywhere from three to five young women at all times, and to be one of his live-ins, the women are told to ditch social media, hand over cell phones, and cut off family and friends.

Again, Art Kelly says he's not doing anything illegal, and these women are adults and choose to be with them. I talk to a woman who claims to have been in this world, Sante McGee, a 38-year-old woman from Atlanta. She says that she was a sexual partner of Art Kelly's for over two years, and that she lived in his house for three weeks. She broke it off in 2016. She explained how Kelly's control worked on her, at least for a little while. And once he see that he had you where he wants you, then that's when he started doing the punishment, not feeding you, locking you in rooms,

and, you know, telling you, basically he makes you think that people are watching you. Like, one day I got in trouble for coming out of my home. She ran into Kelly downstairs, where his bedroom is located. He was with Joycelain. And so I was like, oh, I'm sorry. I didn't know you were in here. He said, this is the reason why I have rules. McGee says she was discered.

disturbed by how he treated the youngest girls in the entourage, Joycelin and a Florida teenager, Azriel Clary, who was 17 when she moved in with Kelly. McGee contacted their parents after she left Kelly in 2016. When I saw that I was disgusted, I reached out to everyone because I felt like he needed to be stopped. Like, this is crazy. So R. Kelly's M.O., according to my sources, is about control. They're told to call him daddy. They're told not to so much as glance at other men.

whether an Uber driver or a guy delivering room service. And like Asante, they also can't move about freely. Kelly tells them they must text him or an assistant if they want to leave their rooms or one of the two black Mercedes cargo vans he travels in. Kelly's terrified of airplanes. These rules can leave Kelly's women stranded for hours, starving and forced to urinate in cups. So that's what the savages are thinking about when they're told by authorities that Joycelyan is 22 and free to legally do as she wants.

When we first came out publicly, people were saying she's grown now. She's over 18. But any parent, no matter of your daughter, is 3 or she's 33, will want to hear from that daughter. I still talk to my mom every day. My husband's talked to his mom every day or every other day. And so the silence that we have and the silence that we have been getting, that's a strong, loud, clear signal that something is very wrong.

Joycillin's family hasn't seen her since December 2016. They hired a lawyer, Gerald Griggs, shortly after they learned their daughter had left college and gone to live with R. Kelly. The law is the great equalizer, and Mr. Kelly needs to understand that there are laws in this country. We've seen Harvey Weinstein fall. We've seen Kevin Spacey fall.

It's time for an intervention in this situation. The savages know it won't be easy getting their daughter away from Kelly. Griggs reminds him of that all the time, but they're consumed by their mission and not ready to give up. At Radio Lab, we love nothing more than nerding out about science, neuroscience, chemistry. But we do also like to get into other kinds of stories, stories about policing or politics, country music, hockey, sex, of bugs. Regardless of. whether we're looking at science or not science, we bring a rigorous curiosity to get you the answers.

And hopefully make you see the world anew. Radio Lab, Adventures on the Edge of what we think we know. Wherever you get your podcast. Support for this podcast comes from Is Business Broken? A podcast from the Marotra Institute at Boston University. On the show, host Kurt Nickish asks the thorny questions necessary for this moment about the role business plays in society. Questions like, why are executives paid so much?

Why is innovation in healthcare so hard? Is ESG just greenwashing? And of course, is business broken? Follow is business broken wherever you get your podcasts. There is something powerful about the sound of the human voice. Beautifully produced audio has the unique power to connect and inspire. Tell your organization's story with a custom podcast from CitySpace Productions, the Creative Studio from WBUR's business partnerships team.

Become a thought leader. Recruit new talent. Reach new audiences. Whatever your goal, we can help. Discover how the magic is made at WBUR.org slash creative studio. I don't like telling my parents, like, you know, who I, like, what guys and stuff I talk to. Why? Because they're overprotectives.

So, yeah. You may be right on that one. Jay walks ahead of her parents. It gets annoying a little bit sometimes. So I wouldn't say they're more strict on me, but it's just the situation with Joyce Lynn and what's going on with her. Like, I'm about to get older, go to college,

so, you know, don't have time to be immature about things. And, you know, growing up, that's what I call it. In some ways, as savage parents admit, they're more overprotective of their younger daughters after what happened to Joycelain. They were naive and enthusiastic when Joycelain expressed interest in singing. She's 13 years old here,

singing her original song, Red Light, Greenlight. When Joycelain started singing, she particularly liked gospel. At eight years old, her parents took her to a Lisa McClendon concert. That inspired her to want to be a singer. Lisa McClinton.

Yes. You were faithful, oh, so faithful, something like that. She loved that song. You was a privilege and a singer. honor to be worship on his throne. That's the words of it. Joyce Lynn performed in her church.

Lots of people in the congregation told her she'd be famous one day. She did like a little cute song rap with another. She sang the part. I know I can. So everybody started going around the church and telling her how good she was. And so she was going to be famous one day or whatever. But it was cute. She had a lot of energy.

Joycelyn was a girl scout. She took tennis lessons. Her parents tried to channel that. energy. I said, look, this girl is too hyper. Let's find somewhere where she can store that energy somewhere else, so I start putting in karate classes. And she kind of dealt with that a little bit. I would say she was a little spoiled. As she got older, she was still loud at home, but became shy in public. She had friends, but she wasn't super outgoing. Because she was very pretty young girl growing up, and she's still pretty. Maybe they, maybe thought she was stuck up or what you call,

And so a group of girls jumped her in the bathroom, and we had to pursue some legal actions through the school system for that. She was shaken but okay. When she was 17, Joycelyn got her first job at Zaxby's, a fast food restaurant popular in the South. She used most of her earnings to buy clothes, which her younger sister would sometimes take. They would fight, but mostly Joycelyn was a normal kid.

She was a C student. Well, yeah, she was more of a C student. I wonder how she made it through school something. time. Because she could have been such a better person far as in her grades, but school just really wasn't her thing, I don't think. She was more interested in music, and the savages encouraged her pop star dreams. That's why her early interactions with Kelly didn't really bother them. But then they'd found out that Joyce Lynn was in contact with Kelly without their knowledge after one of her friends tipped them off. They had what they described as an intervention.

They picked their daughter up at school and sat her down to talk about Kelly. Then they took her back to the dorm. You know, I didn't know if that was a good thing or a bad thing, but I trust my daughter to make a good decision. I told Janjaland that she'll be all right. She's at the dorm. You know, we'll talk about it again tomorrow. Let's just let her get some rest. And lo and behold, before we got back into Atlanta region, because it was about 30 minutes from Atlanta where she was going to school at, her roommate called us and told us, Tori had called us and told us that Joisland had taken a, someone had came and picked her up,

or she had taken an Uber, it was one or the other. That's December of 2016. The savages were told that Joycelyne left to go meet Kelly that same night. That was the last time they saw her. Okay, this is where our Kelly stayed. Would you like to see that house? When her parents found out that she had dropped out of college and was living with R. Kelly,

they held a press conference at a house, just outside Atlanta that R. Kelly was renting. I just wanted her home and to try to get her rehabilitated to the Joycelin that we know and miss. Stockholm syndrome, that's what my daughter has right now. This house was one of the places where Kelly allegedly kept his stable of girlfriends. When he left town soon after, he was reportedly evicted from this house and another in Atlanta in February of 2018. Joycelyn went with him. Jay, like her sister, Joycelain, is also a performance.

and is encouraged like her sister Joyselen was to pursue a music career. She wrote a song called Be True. Which, of course, is about my sister and other girls as well. That is in a very bad situation. And hopefully this message of the song will get to her. So that's the whole purpose and point. It's about getting Joycelyn home. But there's something about it that doesn't quite feel right to Kenyette Barnes.

She's the co-founder of a movement called Mute R. Kelly, whose goal it is to stop R. Kelly from having concerts, stop stations from playing his music, to mute him. Oh, my God. I thought they sent me that link. They put it on my Facebook page. I was like, what are you doing? And I'm like, okay, well, part of the reason why no one's taking you guys seriously

is because you're coming off opportunistic. So here's my... My opinion of that. Just because they might be somewhat opportunistic, they did not intend for their daughter to be abused. And that's just kind of where I am. So, yes, there might be 30% of this that's drama, but they truly want their daughter back. They do. Does Cagnette blame the savages for encouraging their daughter to work with R. Kelly?

I'm really struggling with blaming them. However, I do believe that as far as their image, they are a little tone deaf. Why did they bring their daughter to R. Kelly? Because he is the king of R&B. Because if their daughter wants to be a star, being seen with R. Kelly, being promoted by R. Kelly will make them a star. When the same thing happened with the Olympic guy. She's talking here about Larry Nassar, the convicted serial child molester who was a USA Gymnastics National Team Doctor.

He was accused of molesting at least 250 girls and young women, and it had been going on for decades. Kenyette points out that we didn't ask why the parents of gymnasts let their daughters keep seeing Nassar. No one asked those parents that. What they knew was, you know what, this guy is good. This guy's going to train my daughter to be a class Olympian. That's all they saw. That is the same thing with R. Kelly.

So why are people questioning the savages? I just see that there's a cultural double standard when it comes to this kind of behavior. And to some degree, I believe that we're placing these parents, mostly black parents, under a heightened scrutiny. Kenyette adds that R. Kelly targets vulnerable young black women, and that may be another reason authorities aren't getting involved. But here's a thing. Art Kelly's reputation precedes him, right?

He's not exactly the kind of guy he'd want your daughter in the room with. So what were the savages thinking? Me and my wife would always be there. If both us couldn't be there, one us would be there. So we wasn't worried about anything that would happen because we was always there with her. At the time that we met Mr. Kelly, he had a reputation of working with big, big musicians like Whitney Houston, Michael Jackson.

Everything was coordinated professionally by his assistant. Everything was coordinated through R. Kelly's assistant. And that, paired with R. Kelly being such a giant star, made the savages feel like their relationship with Kelly was a professional one. Obviously, in hindsight, they feel differently. I think me and Jay was always on the same page. We always wished that we never taken Joycelyn to R. Kelly. His motives was to get this young lady and turn her against her family.

That's the most important thing. That's what his motives were to keep her as a pet. I really think it hit me when I saw her face on, you know, TMZ. On July 17, 2017, Joycelyn appeared on TMZ after a damning BuzzFute report that said she was being held against her will as part of a kind of cult. Joycely in a dimly lit room told her parents to stop bothering her. I'm in a happy place with my life, and I'm not being brainwashed or anything like that. But when asked where she was or if she could leave, here's what happened.

Are you currently in Georgia, or where are you? I actually, I'm not, no, not. I wouldn't want to speak on that as well. Are you with other roommates? Are you free to go from where you are? No, I want to speak on that as well. I just really can't explain it. I just know how my sister is.

I know how she talks. I know how she, you know, her posture. It just was not how she usually would be. John Jolin and Tim haven't seen Joycelyn in more than a year. They say they've spoken to her twice, once for 30 seconds and another time for two minutes. And both calls happen in the middle of the night. Here's her attorney, Gerald Griggs.

I don't want her calling at 3 o'clock in the morning. I want her calling now. She can call me anytime. I'll give my number like I gave it to the manager. They aren't ever sure if it's really her. So we want to speak directly to her in person to assess that. And I think if nothing nefarious is going on, that's a reasonable offer to make it happen.

I made that offer to the manager, and he also told me to trust the process. And the only process I trust is a legal process. If you're not holding somebody against their will, and I said this, if you're not holding somebody against their will, put her on the phone right now. Silence. I tried to talk with Art Kelly for months, even tracked him down in Detroit and asked personally. He walked away and his manager, James Mason, has declined multiple requests since then. Just after midnight, the day we were set to publish, I got a response from a Kelly strategist to some of my questions. In the statement, his management team called the idea that Kelly isolated or controlled his entourage, quote, absolutely false, end quote.

Then there were the savages. Kelly's team said they have encouraged Joycelyan to call her parents and offered to fly her to see them. In their statement, they say that when Joycelyan first met Kelly in 2015, Tim Savage, quote, pulled so. strings to put her on stage at an R. Kelly show so she could meet him. The father also put his younger daughter on stage two. This is in stark contrast to the carefully cultivated image the father puts out now, that of the overly protective dad, end quote. When I asked Tim Savage to respond, he said a Kelly staffer came to his clothing store in Georgia and offered to escort Joyce Lynn and her younger sister to the R. Kelly concert. She was just how people to perform in that. that arena and what she normally not used to,

because my daughter used to perform with some other groups here in Georgia. Kelly's management team also states that Kelly has paid for John Julin Savage to see her daughter in Chicago and separately arranged for Joycelain to visit her parents twice. The savages say that's true, but that it all occurred before December 2016, before Joycelyn left college to live with Kelly. Kelly's team charges that, quote, nothing stands between the Savage parents and their daughter, other than the savage's apparent unwillingness, to sacrifice their daughter's reputation for their own financial gain.

I called Gerald Griggs to ask him about that. His counsel, we told them in detail what our demands were, and at no point was it a financial settlement. Then we made contact with his new business manager, Mr. Mason, who calls at all hours of the morning, yelling and screaming and doing all kinds of unprofessional things. we want an in-person meeting in a third-party city or in Atlanta where we can physically see Jocelyn Savage and to make sure she's in good health.

Here's Tim Savage. We don't want no phone calls. We don't want nothing. Put her on a plane. Just that simple. He's holding my daughter against her wheel because any time you have something like this, if my daughter could freely talk or call or walk out that building, he wouldn't be calling me. It wouldn't be Mr. Mason.

it wouldn't be Mr. Robert Sylvester Kelly. It would be my daughter. And not one time have I heard my daughter voice. My daughter should be on her own free will to call her mother and father and say that she's fine or come and see her parents at any time. That's not the case here. Mr. Savage, could I ask you, do you have a, what phone number do you have for Joyce Lynn? Yeah, I have a number for Joyce Lynn.

So I tried to call Joyce Lynn. Hey, I don't know if this is Joyce Savage's cell phone. This is Jeff Edgrews calling from the Washington Post. And if you do get this message, I'd appreciate if you could give me a call back. Edge of Fame is available wherever you get your podcasts. We'll be back on Friday with a new episode of Endless Thread. See you then.