Buku Abi has alleged that she was abused by R. Kelly.
The 26-year-old singer is the daughter of the “I Believe I Can Fly” hitmaker, who is presently in prison after being convicted on several counts of child s*xual abuse, and said that she was “too scared” to speak out about how dad allegedly treated her as a youngster.
Speaking in the new documentary “Karma: A Daughter’s Journey” – which premiered on Friday – she said: “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.
“I was too scared to tell anybody. I was too scared to tell my mom.
“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.”
The “Dear Daisy” singer – whose real name is Joann Kelly – admitted that once she did open up to her mother Andrea, she just stopped seeing her father and she “struggled” with that as the years went on.
She said: “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 the documentary series, she stated that she just “pretended to be asleep” when the alleged abuse occurred. She ultimately submitted a complaint as Jane Doe, but a prosecution was impossible since she waited “too long” to report it.
However, the Grammy Award-winning star has quickly denied all of his daughter’s charges.
In a statement to PEOPLE, Kelly’s attorney Jennifer Bonjean stated, “Mr. Kelly adamantly rejects these allegations. His ex-wife made the same complaint years before, which was examined by the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services and found to be false…. And the ‘filmmakers,’ whomever they are, did not contact Mr. Kelly or his team to allow him to deny these derogatory allegations.”
Kelly was previously accused of filming himself having s*x with underage females and of manipulating his 2008 state trial on child pornography charges, for which he was acquitted.
Kelly was sentenced to 20 years in prison in Chicago in February 2023 for a variety of cruelty crimes.
He is now serving 19 years of his two sentences consecutively and will be available for release in 2045.
