R. Kelly’s daughter Buku Abi has come forward with claims of sexual abuse at his hands.
The bombshell claims emerged via a two-episode documentary Karma: A Daughter’s Journey that premiered Friday.
In the TVEI Streaming Network documentary, Abi, now 26, reveals that she first reported it to her mother Andrea in 2009 when she was 10—though she was about 8 or 9 when she encountered his disturbing intention.
“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.
“I was too scared to tell anybody. I was too scared to tell my mom,” Abi recalls, asserting jail is a “well-suited place” for Kelly, 57, as she knows from her “personal experience.”
“I just remember waking up to him touching me,” she recounted while crying. “And I didn’t know what to do, so I just kind of laid there, and I pretended to be asleep.”
“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.”
She regretted her delayed disclosure as by the time she reported it to her mom and they took the matter to police, they couldn’t prosecute him because she “waited too long.”
“So at that point in my life, I felt like I said something for nothing,” she lamented in the documentary, which is often the case with many victims of child sex abuse wait years or decades to reveal what happened to them.
Kelly has denied these allegations, as per his attorney Jennifer Bonjean, who told People that Kelly’s ex-wife “made the same allegation years ago, and it was investigated by the Illinois Department of Children & Family Services and was unfounded”
“The ‘filmmakers,’ whoever they are, did not reach out to Mr. Kelly or his team to even allow him to deny these hurtful claims,” Bonjean said in her statement.
Kelly was sentenced in Chicago to 20 years in prison in February 2023 on charges of child pornography and enticement of minors for sex.
A year prior, he was slapped with 30 years imprisonment for racketeering and sex trafficking charges based out of New York.
The singer is currently serving 19 years of his two sentences concurrently, and he will be eligible for release in 2045.
