R Kelly’s daughter Buku Abi has accused her famous dad of sexually abusing her as a child.
The one-time megastar faced repeated accusations of sexual abuse before he was finally jailed in 2022 on sex trafficking and racketeering charges.
And nearly six years after explosive documentary Surviving R Kelly led to authorities reexamining the evidence against him, the singer’s oldest daughter, born Joann Kelly, has lifted the lid on her own alleged abuse in 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.”
The 57-year-old jailed star 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.
Kelly’s attorneys have denied all claims in the documentary.
