Buku Abi, who happens to be the daughter of R. Kelly, is making her first public statement regarding the alleged abuse she endured at the hands of her father when she was a little girl.
Abi, who is now 26 years of age, claims she was assaulted by her father in the two-episode documentary Karma: A Daughter’s Journey, which debuted yesterday, October 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, he would do something to me,” she says in the documentary, the first episode of which was streamed yesterday.
To that effect, she added “I was too scared to tell anybody. I was too scared to tell my mom.”
Abi, who was born Joann Kelly, says she thinks jail is a “well-suited place” for Kelly, who is currently 57, because she knows from “personal experience,” even though she does not go into depth about the alleged abuse in the first episode.
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“That one millisecond really just changed everything—my entire life, my identity as a person, the sparkle and light I used to have,” she adds.
“My brother Robert and sister Jaah stopped going over there when I told my mother. I stopped going there as well. And I still have a lot of trouble with it now.
In the second episode, Buku elaborates on the alleged maltreatment, stating that it occurred when she was eight or nine years old.
Shouting, “I just remember waking up to him touching me,” she narrates. “And I didn’t know what to do, so I just kind of laid there, and I pretended to be asleep.”
When Buku eventually told her mother what had happened, they went to the police and reported the incident under the name “Jane Doe,” but, as she notes in the documentary, “I waited too long for them to be able to prosecute him.”
Therefore, I felt like I spoke something pointless at that particular time in my life.”
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Meanwhile, Kelly’s lawyer Jennifer Bonjean claimed in a statement to People that her client “vehemently denies these allegations.”
Years ago, his ex-wife made the same accusation, which the Illinois Department of Children & Family Services looked into but concluded to be untrue.
And Mr. Kelly and his team were not contacted by the ‘filmmakers,’ whatever they are, to even give him the opportunity to refute these damaging allegations.”
Fortunately, Kelly was found guilty in Chicago in February 2023 of using child pornography and luring adolescents into her presence for sex.
To that effect, he was given a 20-year prison term.
Meanwhile, he was given a 30-year prison term the previous year for racketeering and sex trafficking offences stemming from New York.
He will be eligible for parole in 2045 after completing 19 years of his two sentences concurrently.