Saturday, October 12, 2024 - 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.
In a two-episode documentary Karma: A Daughter’s
Journey, which premiered today, October 11, Abi, 26, claims she was abused by
her father as a child, and she 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 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.”
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."
In February 2023, Kelly was sentenced in Chicago to 20 years
in prison on charges of child pornography and enticement of minors for sex. The
year prior, he was sentenced to 30 years in prison for racketeering and sex
trafficking charges based out of New York. He's currently serving 19 years of
his two sentences concurrently, and he will be eligible for release in 2045.
0 Comments