R. Kelly’s Ex-Girlfriend Azriel Clary Says Singer Coached Her Through 2019 Interview Where She Defended Him: He Had Us Practicing Every Single Day
R. Kelly’s Ex-Girlfriend Azriel Clary Says Singer Coached Her Through 2019 Interview Where She Defended Him: He Had Us Practicing Every Single Day
Azriel Clary is opening up about a past interview regarding R. Kelly.
Earlier today (Thursday, Sept. 30th), Azriel Clary–one of R. Kelly‘s former girlfriends and accusers–sat down with Gayle King for an interview. This comes just a few days after R. Kelly was found guilty on all counts in his sex trafficking trial.
As you may recall, this is not Azriel Clary‘s first interview with Gayle King. Back in 2019, she joined Jocelyn Savage–another one of R. Kelly‘s girlfriends at the time–for an interview with the broadcast journalist. At the time, Azriel Clary had been living with R. Kelly for almost five years. During the sit-down, Azriel fiercely defended R. Kelly:
“You guys don’t know the truth. You guys are believing some f**king façade that our parents are saying. This is all f**king lies for money! And if you can’t see that, you’re ignorant and you’re stupid.”
Now, Azriel Clary is opening up about the role R. Kelly allegedly played in her previous comments on the singer’s controversy. She revealed that R. Kelly instructed her and Jocelyn Savage to “be angry” during their 2019 interview:
“He did his interview first. He came in and he told us to be angry and be upset… so we came in angry. I was scared because I was like ‘I don’t want the world to see me this way.’ I’m loving, I’m caring, I’m compassionate. And no one got to see that side of me.”
Gayle King then brought up that Azriel revealed she was not honest during their prior sit-down. When asked to elaborate on what she was dishonest about, Azriel Clary replied:
“Everything! Before that interview, he had us practicing every single day – answering questions, and if he didn’t like our answer he would tell us exactly what to say and how to say it. Anytime you mention anything about sexual preference, we already know to say ‘I’m not here to talk about that’ because that’s what he told us to say every single time.”
Azriel continued, saying that R. Kelly was ultimately pleased with her first interview with Gayle King:
“He was so happy. He was like ‘You guys did amazing, you did so well, you carried yourselves so well.’ I believe he even got food and wanted to celebrate–that’s how happy he was with that interview. And I was just there like ‘Wow.'”
She then detailed how her life with R. Kelly seemed to be normal at the time:
“Everything that we were living in had become very normal. To break out of that, I had to realize that this is actually abnormal… It was not only me–it was other women, other women who were older than me. When I met him at 17, he had four other women. So these women are all normalizing his actions, and then you have assistants normalizing their actions, and you have workers and security and everyone else that normalizes it. So me – being very young at that time – I just learned to normalize it.”
Azriel Clary then claimed that she doesn’t believe that anyone could have helped her out of the situation:
“I feel that is something that I would have had to have woken up from myself, something that I would have had to realize by myself. A lot of people don’t realize with victims [that] the more you try to help them, the more it upsets them sometimes.”
Later in the interview, Azriel called her first sit-down with Gayle King “a blessing” and revealed how the journalist made her “wake up”:
“I feel like that interview was a blessing because for five years, since I was 17, I didn’t have any relationships with any other women except for women that he had been intimate with. So when I did that interview with you, I instantly regretted immediately how I reacted. Something about just watching you be very casual and calm and collected, it just reminded me of me. I was like ‘I used to be that poised. I used to be that calm. What happened to that girl? Where did she go?’… Seeing you had shifted something in me. It kind of made me kind of wake up in a sense.”
What do you think about Azriel Clary’s recent claims? Comment down below to let us know.