One of R. Kelly’s daughters has come out to accuse the convicted felon of sexually abusing her when she as just a child.
Buku Abi, 26, said in TVEI Streaming Network’s two-episode documentary Karma: A Daughter’s Journey that the disgraced 57-year-old singer had abused her when she was around eight or nine years old.
She said she first reported his alleged misconduct to her mother in 2009, when she was around 10 years old.
Kelly (full name: Robert Kelly) is currently serving a 31-year sentence at a medium-security federal prison in North Carolina after he was convicted in 2021 and 2022 of multiple child sexual abuse charges.
‘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,’ Abi said in the first episode of the documentary, via People.
R. Kelly’s daughter Buku Abi, 26, accused him of sexually abusing her when she was just eight or nine in TVEI Streaming Network’s two-episode documentary Karma: A Daughter’s Journey
She said she first reported his alleged misconduct to her mother in 2009, when she was around 10 years old; R. Kelly is seen in his mugshot from February 22, 2019
‘I was too scared to tell anybody. I was too scared to tell my mom,’ she admitted.
Abi, who was born Joann Kelly, declined to share details about the abuse she allegedly suffered at the hands of her father in the first episode, which premiered for streaming on Friday.
However, she did say that prison was a ‘well-suited place’ for her father to be, a conclusion she arrived at based on her ‘personal experience’ with him.
She spoke of the ways Kelly’s alleged abuse completely altered the course of her life.
Abi added that ‘one millisecond completely changed my whole life and changes who I was as a person and changed the sparkle I had and the light I used to carry.’
In the documentary, she makes it clear that her visitations with her father ended after she reported the alleged abuse to her mother, and she said her brother Robert and sister Jaah also stopped going to see him.
But to this day, she ‘still struggle[s] with it a lot.’
Abi revealed more details of her accusations in the second episode.
Abi (born Joann Kelly) didn’t give specifics of the abuse she allegedly suffered, but she did say prison was a ‘well-suited place’ for her father; pictured in Karma: A Daughter’s Journey trailer
She spoke of the ways Kelly’s alleged abuse completely altered the course of her life. In episode two, she recounted through tears how she ‘[woke] up to him touching me’
She waited to tell her mother about the alleged abuse, but once she did she and her siblings stopped spending time with their father
Abi’s mother Drea Kelly (pictured with ex-husband R. Kelly in the documentary) took her to police to report the alleged crime as a ‘Jane Doe,’ but police said too much time had passed for them to investigate
