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.
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.
“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,” 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.”
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.”
R. Kelly in court in Chicago in 2019.
E. JASON WAMBSGANS/AFP via Getty
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.
The “Ignition (Remix)” singer was acquitted of child pornography charges in 2008 after allegations had surrounded him for decades, PEOPLE previously reported.
R. Kelly’s Karma: A Daughter’s Journeyfollows his family as they try to move on with their lives after his arrest and sentencing, and Abi prepares to welcome a child of her own. Kelly’s ex-wife Andrea — who finalized her divorce from the singer in 2009 and has also accused him of abuse — as well as their children Jaah, 23, and Robert, 22, are also featured in the documentary, as are Andrea’s parents Clifford and Melissa.
Part 1 of the series features Andrea’s harrowing account of the night she left Kelly for good, and took her three children out of the home they shared to her father Clifford, whom the kids had never met before due to Kelly’s alleged controlling behavior.
Abi says life in their father’s shadow was difficult, and she struggled with suicidal thoughts.
R. Kelly in court Sept. 17, 2019.
Antonio Perez/Getty
“I just got to a point where I didn’t care anymore. I didn’t care if I lived or died,” she says. “I remember one day, my mom and I, we went to Target and I had to use the bathroom. We went to the bathroom and she came out and I was washing my hands and she saw that my wrists were all cut up, and she just immediately dropped everything, and she was asking like, ‘What’s going on? Are you OK?’ “
“She was really worried, and in that moment, I broke down and I had to tell her, like, ‘I don’t think I’m OK. I don’t think that I can do this. I don’t think that I’m gonna make it through to live out the rest of my life.’ ”
Meanwhile, all the parties interviewed in the doc say they’re satisfied with Kelly’s lengthy prison sentence.
“If you don’t want to go to jail, don’t do s— that gets you locked up,” Robert Jr. says, while Jaah adds, “You make your bed, you lay in it.”
