- Abi, 26, alleged Kelly sexually abused her when she was eight or nine years old.
- She recalled that when she woke up she found her singer father touching her inappropriately.
- Kelly, 57, is serving 31 years in federal prison for child sexual abuse convictions.
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One of R. Kelly’s daughters has come forward to accuse the convicted felon of sexually abusing her when she was just a child.
Buku Abi, 26, said in TVEI Streaming Network’s two-episode documentary Karma: A Daughter’s Journey that the 57-year-old disgraced 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 about 10 years old.
Kelly (full name: Robert Kelly) is currently serving a 31-year sentence in a medium-security federal prison in North Carolina after being convicted in 2021 and 2022 of multiple counts of child sexual abuse.
‘He was my everything. For a long time I didn’t even want to believe what happened. I didn’t know that even if he was a bad person 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 years old 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 about 10 years old; R. Kelly appears in his mugshot from February 22, 2019.
“I was too scared to tell anyone. I was too scared to tell my mom,” he admitted.
Abi, whose real name is Joann Kelly, declined to share details about the abuse she allegedly suffered at the hands of her father in the first episode, which premiered on streaming Friday.
However, he did say that prison was an “appropriate place” for his father to be, a conclusion he reached based on his “personal experience” with him.
He spoke about the ways in which Kelly’s alleged abuse completely altered the course of his life.
Abi added that “one millisecond completely changed my entire life and changed who I was as a person and changed the shine I had and the light I used to carry.”
In the documentary, she makes it clear that her visits to her father ended after she reported the alleged abuse to her mother, and said her brother Robert and sister Jaah also stopped going to see him.
But to this day, she “still struggles with it a lot.”
Abi revealed more details of her accusations in the second episode.
“I just remember waking up and him touching me,” she said through tears. “And I didn’t know what to do, so I just lay there and pretended to be asleep.”
The singer said she told her mother what had happened and then the two filed a police report listing her as ‘Jane Doe.’
However, the delay between the time the alleged abuse occurred and the time Abi told her mother may have ruined her chances of getting justice.
‘They couldn’t process it because I waited too long. “So at that point in my life, I felt like I had said something for nothing,” he explained.
Abi (born Joann Kelly) did not give details of the abuse she allegedly suffered, but she did say that prison was a “suitable place” for her father; In the photo from the trailer for Karma: A Daughter’s Journey.
He spoke about the ways in which Kelly’s alleged abuse completely altered the course of his life. In episode two, she tearfully recounted how ‘(she woke up) and he touched 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.