R.Kelly still features in the news for wrong reasons. Several years after he started facing charges for sexual assaults, his daughter Buku Abi claims she was a victim, too.
“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,” she says in the documentary, premiered on Friday TVEI Streaming Network.
In the new two-episode documentary “Karma: A Daughter’s Journey” Abi, 26, claimed the singer abused her as a child. She allegedly first reported it to her mother Andrea in 2009, when she was 10 years old.
“I was too scared to tell anybody. I was too scared to tell my mom,” she claimed.
She expressed the belief that jail is a “well-suited place” for her 57-year-old- father.
“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.”
R.Kelly denies it all.
In the second episode, Buku said the alleged abuse 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.”
She eventually told her mother and they went to the police. “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,” she added.
R. Kelly has however denied it all. In a statement to PEOPLE, his attorney, Jennifer Bonjean, said, “Mr. Kelly vehemently denies these allegations. His ex-wife made the same allegations years ago, and it was investigated by the Illinois Department of Children & Family Services and was unfounded.”
Multiple accusations.
R.Kelly has faced multiple accusations over the years, primarily involving sexual abuse and misconduct. He was accused of sexual exploitation of minors, racketeering, and violations of the Mann Act. The act prohibits transporting people across state lines for illegal sexual purposes.
In fact, the accusations gained significant media attention in the late 1990s and early 2000s. In more recent years, the 2019 documentary series Surviving R.Kelly brought forward numerous testimonies from women. Many of them alleged that Kelly had abused them, mostly when they were underaged.
His convictions
In 2021, R.Kelly received 30 years prison sentence on federal charges of racketeering and sex trafficking. However, his trial and conviction were largely based on the testimonies of multiple survivors who accused him of manipulating and abusing them over many years.
In February 2023, Kelly got 20 years prison sentence on charges of child pornography and enticement of minors for sex.
He’s currently serving 19 years of his two sentences concurrently, and he will be eligible for release in 2045.
Abi says after her mother divorced Kelly in 2009, life in his shadow was difficult. She even contemplated suicide.
“I just got to a point where I didn’t care anymore.didn’t care if I lived or died,” she says. “I remember one day, my mom and I, we went to Target and I had to use the bathroom.
“We went to the bathroom and she came out and I was washing my hands and she saw that my wrists were all cut up, and she just immediately dropped everything, and she was asking like, ‘What’s going on? Are you OK?’
“I broke down and I had to tell her, like, ‘I don’t think I’m OK. I don’t think that I’m gonna make it through to live out the rest of my life.’”
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