Friday, October 11, 2024 -R. Kelly’s daughter, Buku Abi, is speaking out publicly for the first time about the alleged abuse she suffered during her childhood at the hands of her father.
In a two-episode
documentary Karma: A Daughter’s Journey, which premiered on October
11, Abi, 26, claims she was abused by her father as a child, and 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. I didn’t know that even if he was a bad person he would do something
to me,” she says in the documentary, the first episode of which is streaming
now.
“I was too scared to tell anybody. I was too scared to tell my mom.”
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.”
“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.”
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."
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.
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