R. Kelly’s daughter Buku Abi accuses singer of sexually abusing her as a child

One of R. Kelly’s daughters has accused the convicted felon of sexually abusing her when she was just a child.

Buku Abi, 26, said in TVEI Streaming Network’s two-part documentary Karma: A Daughter’s Journey that the disgraced 57-year-old singer abused her when she was about eight or nine years old.

She said she first reported his alleged misconduct to her mother in 2009, when she was about 10 years old.

Kelly (full name: Robert Kelly) is currently serving a 31-year sentence in a medium-security federal prison in North Carolina after being convicted in 2021 and 2022 of multiple counts of child sexual abuse.

‘He was my everything. For a long time I didn’t even want to believe it was happening. I didn’t know that even if he was a bad person, he would do something to me,” Abi said in the first episode of the documentary, via People.

She said she first reported his alleged misconduct to her mother in 2009, when she was about ten years old; R. Kelly is seen in his mugshot from February 22, 2019

‘I was too scared to tell anyone. “I was too scared to tell my mother,” she admitted.

Abi, born Joann Kelly, refused to share details about the abuse she allegedly suffered at the hands of her father in the first episode, which premiered on streaming on Friday.

However, she did say that prison was a “suitable place” for her father, a conclusion she came to based on her “personal experience” with him.

She opened up about the ways in which Kelly’s alleged abuse completely changed the course of her life.

Abi added that “one millisecond completely changed my entire life and who I was as a person, and changed the brilliance I had and the light I used to carry.”

In the documentary, she makes it clear that her visits to her father ended after she reported the alleged abuse to her mother, and she said her brother Robert and sister Jaah also stopped visiting him.

But to this day, she still struggles[s] a lot with it.’

Abi revealed more details of her allegations in the second episode.

“I remember waking up when he touched me,” she said through tears. “And I didn’t know what to do, so I just lay there and pretended to be asleep.”

The singer said she told her mother what happened, and the two subsequently filed a complaint with police listing her as “Jane Doe.”

However, the delay between when the alleged abuse occurred and when Abi told her mother may have reduced their chances of justice.

‘They couldn’t prosecute him because I waited too long. So at that point in my life, I felt like I was saying something for nothing,” she explained.

Abi (born Joann Kelly) did not provide details of the abuse she allegedly suffered, but she did say that prison was a ‘suitable place’ for her father; depicted in the trailer for Karma: A Daughter’s Journey

She opened up about the ways in which Kelly’s alleged abuse completely changed the course of her life. In episode two she told through tears how she ‘[woke] until he touches me

She waited to tell her mother about the alleged abuse, but once she did, she and her siblings stopped spending time with their father