R Kelly’s daughter, Buku Abi, has accused her renowned father of sexually abusing her during her childhood.
The former superstar faced numerous allegations of sexual misconduct before ultimately being incarcerated in 2022 on charges of sex trafficking and racketeering.
Now, nearly six years after the groundbreaking documentary Surviving R Kelly prompted a fresh investigation into the claims against him, the singer’s eldest daughter, who is named Joann Kelly, has revealed details of her own alleged abuse in the new two-part series R Kelly’s Karma: A Daughter’s Journey.
“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, 26, stated, according to New York Daily News. “I was too scared to tell anybody. I was too scared to tell my mom.”
R Kelly also shares children Jaah and Robert Jr. with ex-wife Andrea Kelly, who left him in 2005.
“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 continued. “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.”
In the second part of her documentary Abi goes into more detail, revealing she was eight or nine when she suffered the alleged abuse.
“I just remember waking up to him touching me,” she recalled. “And I didn’t know what to do, so I just kind of laid there, and I pretended to be asleep.”
She and Andrea eventually went to the police, but were told she’d waited too long to file a complaint.
“So at that point in my life, I felt like I said something for nothing,” Abi admitted.
R Kelly’s attorneys have denied all claims in the documentary.
