Singer ‘R. Kelly’s’ Daughter ‘Buku Abi’ Accuses Him Of Sexually Abusing Her As A Child
Buku Abi tells her story in the new documentary 'R. Kelly's Karma: A Daughter's Journey,' now airing on TVEI Streaming Network
Kelly’s daughter, Buku Abi, who was born as Joanne Kelly, is opening up. The rapper’s daughter shared her side of the story months after he was convicted on child pornography charges.
The final minutes of TVEI Streaming Network's new two-episode documentary Karma: A Daughter’s Journey, which premiered today, claim that Abi, 26, was abused by the singer as a child, and first reported it to her mother Andrea in 2009, when she was 10 years old.
She said, “He was my everything. For a long time, I didn’t even want to believe that it happened. I didn’t know that even if he was a bad person that he would do something to me,” a tearful Buku Abi says in R.Kelly‘s Karma: A Daughter’s Journey. “I was too scared to tell anybody. I was too scared to tell my mom.
She continued: “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.” Abi said that “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.”
The episode ends with information about delayed disclosure, which explains that many victims of child sex abuse wait years or decades to reveal what happened to them.
In the second episode, Buku goes into more detail about the alleged abuse, which she says happened when she was 8 or 9. "I just remember waking up to him touching me," she recalls, crying. "And I didn’t know what to do, so I just kind of laid there, and I pretended to be asleep."
Buku says she eventually told her mother what happened, and they went to the police and filed a complaint as "Jane Doe," but, she adds in the documentary, "They couldn’t prosecute him because I waited too long. So at that point in my life, I felt like I said something for nothing."
In a statement to PEOPLE, Kelly's attorney Jennifer Bonjean said, "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."
Though Abi, who was born Joann Kelly, does not go into detail about the alleged abuse in the first episode, she says that she believes jail is a “well-suited place” for Kelly, 57, to be, as she knows from her “personal experience.”
On Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear the imprisoned former R&B superstar’s appeal of his 2022 federal conviction on charges involving child pornography and luring underage girls to have sex with him, one of two cases in which he was found guilty of sex crimes.
In February 2023, Kelly was sentenced in Chicago to 20 years in prison on charges of child pornography and enticement of minors for sex. The year prior, he was sentenced to 30 years in prison for racketeering and sex trafficking charges based out of New York. He's currently serving 19 years of his two sentences concurrently, and he will be eligible for release in 2045.
One more photo below.
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