R. Kelly’s daughter, Buku Abi, recently decided to speak out publicly for the first time about the alleged abuse she suffered throughout her childhood at the hands of her father in the final minutes of TVEI Streaming Network’s new two-episode documentary Karma: A Daughter’s Journey, which premiered yesterday, October 11th. Within the documentary, Abi, 26, claims that the singer abused her as a child and first reported it to her mother, Andrea Kelly, in 2009, when she was ten 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 were a bad person, he would do something to me,” she says in the documentary within the first episode, which is streaming now. “I was too scared to tell anybody. I was too scared to tell my mom.”
Although Abi 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 due to her “personal experience.”
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“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.”
Within the second episode, Abi delves into 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, weeping. “And I didn’t know what to do, so I just kind of laid there, and I pretended to be asleep.”
Abi did disclose what happened to her mother, 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.”
Despite the abuse claims, Kelly’s attorney, Jennifer Bonjean, said in a statement to PEOPLE, “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.”
In February 2023, Kelly was sentenced in Chicago to 20 years in prison on charges of child pornography and enticement of minors for sex. He’s currently serving 19 years of his two sentences concurrently and will be eligible for release in 2045.
