Police on alert at Trump Tower

CPD called to Trump Tower after fight between R. Kelly’s girlfriends

In a series of videos posted to Instagram, Azriel Clary could be seen angrily confronting Joycelyn Savage.

By Sam Charles Jan 8, 2020, 4:04pm CST
Joycelyn Savage (left) and Azriel Clary leaving the Dirksen Federal Courthouse last year. Ashlee Rezin/Sun-Times


R. Kelly’s girlfriends got into a fight — broadcast live to social media — inside the embattled singer’s Trump Tower condo Wednesday afternoon, with one proclaiming that “Rob has been lying to all y’all…and he has people like me lying for him.”

In a series of videos posted to Instagram, Azriel Clary could be seen angrily confronting Joycelyn Savage before a scuffle broke out between the two. Chicago police officers responded and Clary was taken to Northwestern Memorial Hospital, where she was listed in good condition.

Clary said several times that she wanted charges filed against Savage for the alleged attack. Clary also accused Savage of other criminal conduct.

In one video, Clary can be seen talking with CPD officers, who were called to Trump Tower about 2:10 p.m. for a report of a battery in progress, according to a department spokesman.

Clary told them that she was in the unit with a few other people when Savage and another woman — a “handler” for Kelly — arrived to pick up Kelly’s “awards and his Grammys and stuff.”

“After that, she started that I’m so wrong about this and that,” Clary said, adding that Savage soon after “started attacking me.”

“She came to me and attacked me and I had to defend myself,” Clary told police, alleging that Savage hit her with her hands and her phone and tried to kick her, as well.

According to a statement from police, “The offender fled and is not in custody” as of 5 p.m., though Clary told responding officers: “I just want to press charges immediately.”

Steve Greenberg, Kelly’s defense attorney, declined to comment on the videos.


The fight occurred on Kelly’s 53rd birthday.

Kelly remains held without bond at the Metropolitan Correctional Center downtown while he faces a litany of criminal charges in four jurisdictions in three states.

In February 2019, prosecutors in Cook County charged Kelly with 10 counts of aggravated criminal sexual abuse. Three of the four alleged victims in that case were under 18 at the time.

The U.S. attorney’s office in Chicago charged him with nine counts of enticing a minor, three counts of child pornography and one count of obstruction of justice the following July. The obstruction charge stemmed from alleged efforts to illegally secure his acquittal in his 2008 child pornography case.

In Brooklyn, prosecutors charged Kelly and two associates with acting as a criminal enterprise to “promote R. Kelly’s music and the R. Kelly brand and to recruit women and girls to engage in illegal sexual activity with Kelly.”

Last month, prosecutors in New York alleged that Kelly bribed an official in Illinois in 1994 in order to get a fake ID that was used secure a marriage license with the late singer Aaliyah, who was 15 at the time.