After five years of speaking out in support of survivors of R. Kelly ‘s abuse , the singer’s daughter, Buku Abi, revealed that she too was a victim of her father when she was a child.
“I was too scared to tell anyone. I was too scared to tell my mother,” she said.
Abi’s allegations come from the new documentary “R. Kelly’s Karma: A Daughter’s Journey” on streaming platform TVEI, where she highlighted that the incidents occurred when she was between eight and nine years old.
“He was my everything. For the longest time, I didn’t want to believe that that happened,” she said in the first episode of the two-part series, saying that “I didn’t even know that he was a bad person, that he would do that to me.”
In the second episode, Abi claimed that she “would wake up when he touched me” while pretending to fall asleep, and that she told her mother about the incident in 2009, when she was 10 years old.
“I really feel like that millisecond changed my whole life and changed who I was as a person and changed the spark that I had and the light that I used to carry,” she said in the documentary. “After I told my mom, I stopped going there; my brother [Robert] and my sister [Jaah] stopped going there. And even to this day, I still suffer a lot from that.”
Kelly’s attorney, Jennifer Bonjean, “vehemently” denied the latest allegations in a statement to People magazine, saying the filmmakers never contacted Kelly to “deny these hurtful claims.”
“His ex-wife made the same allegation years ago, and it was investigated by the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services and was found to be unfounded,” the attorney said.
In 2022, a federal jury convicted the “I Believe I Can Fly” singer on six of 13 charges, including three counts of producing child pornography and three counts of soliciting minors to engage in illegal sexual activity.
He faces a 30-year prison sentence for sex trafficking of minors, and later had his sentence extended on federal child pornography charges.