R. Kelly’s Daughter Says Singer Sexually Abused Her As A Child

For the first time, R. Kelly’s daughter Buku Abi is speaking out publicly about the alleged abuse she suffered during her childhood at the hands of her father. The TVEI Streaming Network's new two-episode documentary Karma: A Daughter’s Journey, which premiered on Friday (Oct. 11), claims that Abi, was abused by the R&B singer as a child. She also mentioned that it was 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 first episode of the documentary. “I was too scared to tell anybody. I was too scared to tell my mom.”

Born Joann Kelly, she 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, to be. She said 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, Abi 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."

The daughter of Kelly 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."

R. Kelly was sentenced in Chicago to 20 years in prison on charges of child pornography and enticement of minors for sex in February 2023. In June 2022, 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.

R. Kelly's Karma: A Daughter’s Journey follows his family as they work to rebuild their lives after his arrest and sentencing, while Abi prepares to welcome her own child. The documentary also features Kelly’s ex-wife Andrea who divorced the singer in 2009 and has accused him of abuse.

In Part 1, Andrea shares the story of the night she left Kelly for good, taking her three children to her father Clifford, whom they had never met due to Kelly's alleged controlling behavior.