Buku Abi, R. Kelly’s daughter, is coming out publicly for the first time about the abuse she endured as a youngster at the hands of her father.
The last minutes of TVEI Streaming Network’s new two-episode documentary Karma: A Daughter’s Journey, which broadcast today, say that Abi, 26, was molested by the artist as a kid and first reported it to her mother Andrea in 2009, when she was ten.
“He was my everything. For a long time, I refused to accept it had really occurred. I had no idea that even if he was a nasty guy, he would do anything to me,” she adds in the documentary, the first episode of which is now online. “I was too scared to tell anyone.” “I was too scared to tell my mother.”
Though Abi, born Joann Kelly, does not go into detail about the alleged abuse in the first episode, she says she feels prison is a “well-suited place” for Kelly, 57, based on her “personal experience.””I honestly feel like that one instant entirely just altered my whole life and changed who I was as a person and changed the sparkle I had and the brightness I used to carry,” she recounts.” “After telling my mother, I stopped going over there, as did my brother [Robert] and sister [Jaah]. And I still deal with it a lot.”
The program concludes with information regarding delayed disclosure, which explains how many victims of child sex abuse take years or decades to tell what occurred to them.
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In the second episode, Buku goes into further detail about the alleged assault, which she claims occurred when she was 8 or 9. “I just remember waking up with him touching me,” she says, weeping. “And I didn’t know what to do, so I just kind of laid there, and I pretended to be asleep.”
Buku claims she ultimately informed her mother what happened, and they went to the police and filed a complaint under the name “Jane Doe,” but she adds in the video, “They couldn’t prosecute him because I waited too long.” So, at that time in my life, I felt like I had spoken something for nothing.
In a statement, Kelly’s attorney Jennifer Bonjean said, “Mr. Kelly adamantly rejects these charges. His ex-wife made the same accusation years before, and the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services investigated and deemed it to be unsubstantiated…. And the ‘filmmakers,’ whomever they are, did not contact Mr. Kelly or his staff to enable him to rebut these derogatory allegations.”
Kelly was sentenced to 20 years in jail in Chicago in February 2023 for child pornography and sexual enticement of kids. The year before, he was sentenced to 30 years in jail on racketeering and sex trafficking charges in New York. He is now serving 19 years of his two sentences consecutively and will be available for release in 2045.
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PEOPLE previously reported that the “Ignition (Remix)” singer was cleared of child pornography charges in 2008, after decades of claims against him.
R. Kelly’s Karma: A Daughter’s Journey follows his family as they attempt to move on after his arrest and punishment, as Abi prepares to have her own child. The documentary also features Kelly’s ex-wife Andrea, who divorced him in 2009 and has accused him of violence, as well as their daughters Jaah, 23, and Robert, 22, and Andrea’s parents Clifford and Melissa.
Part 1 of the series tells Andrea’s terrible story of leaving Kelly for good and taking her three children out of the house they lived with her father Clifford, whom the children had never seen previously due to Kelly’s claimed controlling conduct.
Abi describes living under their father’s shadow as unpleasant, and she battled with suicide ideas.
“I reached a point where I didn’t care anymore. “I didn’t care whether I lived or died,” she adds. “One day, my mom and I went to Target, and I needed to use the restroom. We went to the restroom, and she came out as I was washing my hands, and she saw that my wrists were all sliced up, and she just stopped everything and said, ‘What’s going on? “Are you okay?”
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“She was quite anxious, and at that point, I broke down and had to tell her, ‘I don’t believe I’m OK. I don’t believe I can do it. I don’t believe I’ll make it through to the end of my life.”
Meanwhile, all of the people featured for the documentary indicate they are happy with Kelly’s extended jail term.
“If you don’t want to go to jail, don’t do s— that gets you locked up,” Robert Jr. says. Jaah adds, “You make your bed, you lay in it.”
R. Kelly’s Karma: A Daughter’s Journey is now available on TVEI Streaming Network.
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