Related Articles
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.”
