"I was too scared to tell anybody," Buku Abi, now 26, said in a new two-part documentary.
R. Kelly’s daughter Buku Abi is claiming in a new documentary that her father sexually abused her as a child.
Abi, whom Kelly shares with his ex-wife Andrea “Drea” Kelly, made the accusation in the two-part series R. Kelly‘s Karma: A Daughter’s Journey, which premiered through the TVEI Streaming Network on Friday (Oct. 11).
“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, whose legal name is Joann Kelly, says in the episode. “I was too scared to tell anybody. I was too scared to tell my mom.”
In the second episode, Abi, now 26, claims the abuse happened when she was 8 or 9 years old. “I just remember waking up to him touching me,” she tearfully recalls. “And I didn’t know what to do, so I just kind of laid there, and I pretended to be asleep.” She added, “from that moment on, I was a different person.”
Abi says she initially reported the alleged abuse to her mother in 2009, and a complaint was filed under “Jane Doe,” but the statute of limitations had run out. “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,” she said.
Kelly’s attorney Jennifer Bonjean said in a statement to People that the imprisoned singer “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.”
The disgraced R&B singer, whose real name is Robert Sylvester Kelly, is currently serving a 30-year prison sentence after he was convicted of racketeering and sex trafficking charges in 2021. In 2022, Kelly was also convicted of six counts of child pornography and enticing a minor to engage in sexual activity.
The first two episodes of R. Kelly’s Karma: A Daughter’s Journey are currently streaming through the TVEI Streaming Network.
Billboard.com