R. Kelly’s daughter, Buku Abi, is speaking out against her father for the first time.
Source: Michael Tullberg / Getty
During the final minutes of TVEI Streaming Network’s new two-episode documentary Karma: A Daughter’s Journey, Abi claims she was abused by the singer as a child. She also reveals that she first reported it to her mother Andrea in 2009, when she was 10 years old.
“He was my everything. For a long time, I didn’t even want to believe that it happened,” she said in the doc, according to PEOPLE. “I didn’t know that even if he was a bad person that he would do something to me.”
Buku continued, “I was too scared to tell anybody. I was too scared to tell my mom.”
In the first episode, Abi, who was born Joann Kelly, doesn’t go into more detail about the alleged abuse, but she does say that she thinks jail is a “well-suited place” for her father, which she knows from her “personal experience.”
“I really feel like that one millisecond completely just changed my whole life and changed who I was as a person and changed the sparkle I had and the light I used to carry,” she says. “After I told my mom, I didn’t go over there anymore; my brother [Robert] and sister [Jaah], we didn’t go over there anymore. And even up until now I struggle with it a lot.”
Abi does go into more detail in about the alleged abuse in the second episode, revealing it happened when she was 8 or 9.
“I just remember waking up to him touching me,” she remembers while crying. “And I didn’t know what to do, so I just kind of laid there, and I pretended to be asleep.”
Buku went on to say that she eventually told her mother what happened, and they went to the police and filed a complaint as “Jane Doe.”
“They couldn’t prosecute him because I waited too long,” Abi said. “So at that point in my life, I felt like I said something for nothing.”
Kelly’s attorney Jennifer Bonjean responded to these allegations in a statement to PEOPLE, saying: “Mr. Kelly vehemently denies these allegations. His ex-wife made the same allegation years ago, and it was investigated by the Illinois Department of Children & Family Services and was unfounded…. And the ‘filmmakers,’ whoever they are, did not reach out to Mr. Kelly or his team to even allow him to deny these hurtful claims.”
R. Kelly was sentenced to 20 years in prison on charges of child pornography and enticement of minors for sex in Feb. 2023. He was sentenced to 30 years in prison a year prior for racketeering and sex trafficking charges based out of New York.
He’s currently serving 19 years of his two sentences and will be eligible for release in 2045.