R. Kelly, the R&B singer who is in federal prison for racketeering and sex trafficking, is being publicly accused by his daughter of sexually abusing her when she was a child.
Buku Abi, also known as Joanne Kelly, shares her allegations in a new documentary called R. Kelly’s Karma: A Daughter’s Story. In the first episode, the 26-year-old says, “It was really hard. 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.”
Kelly’s attorney, Jennifer Bonjean, has not responded directly to Entertainment Weekly’s request for comment, but she denied Abi’s claims in a statement to PEOPLE. She 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. The ‘filmmakers’ did not reach out to Mr. Kelly or his team to allow him to deny these hurtful claims.”
Andrea Kelly, who is R. Kelly’s ex-wife and Abi’s mother, accused R. Kelly of molesting an unnamed young girl in 2009. This claim came up in their divorce papers in 2014 but was kept secret until it was revealed in 2019 or 2020. When this accusation was made public in 2020, R. Kelly’s lawyer stated that it was “100% false.”
Andrea Kelly said that a caseworker from the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services believed the young girl’s claims but had to label them as “unfounded” because too much time had passed between the event and when it was reported. In the documentary R. Kelly’s Karma, Abi is identified as the unnamed girl in this case.
In the second episode of R. Kelly’s Karma, Abi emotionally details the alleged abuse, which she says occurred when she was 8 or 9 years old. “He was having a party, and I didn’t want to be without him, so instead of sleeping in my room, I decided to sleep in his office space that was near the party,” she recalls tearfully. “And just, I remember falling asleep, and it had to be like 3 or 4 in the morning, and I just remember waking up to him touching me and I didn’t know what to do. So I just kinda laid there and I pretended to be asleep.”
Abi explains that she felt really heavy and different after the incident. She says, “From that moment on, I was not the same person.” She was too scared to tell anyone, so it was hard for her to accept what happened. For a long time, she tried to forget about it, but eventually, it became too overwhelming. She realized she needed to talk about it, so she decided to tell her mom.
Abi says she told her mom about the alleged abuse when she was 10 years old in 2009. She remembers, “When I told her, it completely broke her heart.” After sharing this, she stopped visiting her dad regularly. “He was my everything, but after that day, I didn’t go over there anymore. My brother and sister and I didn’t go either. Even now, I struggle with the idea of never wanting to talk to him again, but I also want to because he’s my dad.”
In the documentary, Abi, who is a musician, talks about feeling overwhelmed by the legal process after telling her mom. She had to speak with police officers and counselors about what happened, but since she waited so long to speak up, they couldn’t do much. “My mom had to go to court for me. They basically couldn’t prosecute him because I waited too long. I felt like I said something for nothing. It felt like a waste of time, and I felt like I was putting my mom through so much for nothing.”
As a result of the alleged abuse, Abi says she spent time in a mental hospital and tried to take her own life several times. “I really feel like that one moment changed my whole life, who I was as a person, and took away the sparkle and light I used to have.”
R. Kelly, who is 57 years old, is currently serving a 30-year prison sentence after being found guilty of racketeering and breaking anti-sex trafficking laws. During his trial, some witnesses said they saw Kelly sexually abuse the late singer Aaliyah when she was a young teenager. Kelly denied all the abuse claims, and his lawyers argued that any sexual encounters were consensual.
In the past, Kelly was also taken to court in 2008 for child pornography charges related to a famous 2002 video that showed him allegedly urinating on an underage girl. He pleaded not guilty and was found not guilty.
After reports of sexual abuse allegations from Buzzfeed News and the Lifetime documentary Surviving R. Kelly, R. Kelly was charged in 2019 with 10 counts of aggravated criminal sexual abuse involving four victims, three of whom were minors at the time.
More cases and allegations came after that, including one in Chicago where Kelly was found guilty of producing child pornography and child enticement. He received an additional 20-year sentence for this case, but most of those years will be served at the same time as his 30-year sentence. Recently, the U.S. Supreme Court decided not to hear Kelly’s appeal regarding the Chicago case.
