The daughter of R. Kelly and wife Andrea Kelly is opening up about her alleged sexual abuse at the hands of her father in a new documentary about the singer.
On Friday (October 11), TVEI Networks released the first of a two-part exposé about Kelly and her relationship with her children, titled “Karma: A Daughter’s Journey.” In the film, his daughter Buku Abi (born Joanne Kelly) shares details of an incident she says happened when she was around eight or nine years old, TMZ reports.
The now 26-year-old claims she woke up to find R. Kelly touching her and pretending to be asleep. In the trailer for the documentary, Abi can be heard mentioning this life-shattering moment.
“He was everything to me. For a long time, I didn’t even want to believe this was happening,” she said, crying. “I didn’t know that even if he was a bad person, he would do something to me. I really feel that that millisecond completely changed my life.
Elsewhere in the trailer – which also features her mother and brother Robert Kelly Jr – Buku Abi says she won’t take her son to visit her father, and sheds further light on their fractured relationship, which he previously described as This relationship is attributed to his father.
“No one wants to be the child of a father who harms women and children,” she said, later adding, “He knows exactly why we can’t have the relationship we want to have with him.”
While this may be the first time she’s spoken publicly about the alleged incident, it’s not the first time Joanne Kelly has made these accusations.
According to TMZ, she told her mother about the incident in 2009, about two years after it happened. Andrea Kelly filed a complaint at the time, listing her daughter as Jane Doe; however, they were told the statute of limitations had expired.
R. Kelly’s attorney, Jennifer Bonjean, said in a statement to the media that he “strongly denies these allegations.”
“His ex-wife made the same accusation several years ago,” Bonjean wrote. “The Illinois Department of Children and Family Services investigated it, but found it to be unfounded… and the ‘filmmakers,’ whatever they were No one has contacted Mr Kelly or his team or even allowed him to deny these hurtful claims.
Back in 2022, a grand jury returned guilty verdicts on six of the 13 federal charges R. Kelly faced, including three child pornography charges for sexually abusing four girls, three of whom were minors. .
They also found the Chicago native guilty of making a video of himself sexually assaulting his 14-year-old goddaughter, which led to three additional charges of making sex tapes with minors.
He was sentenced by a Chicago judge to 20 years in prison. Kelly prevailed, however, with the judge ruling that all but one year should be served concurrently with the 30-year sentence he is currently serving in New York on racketeering charges.
However, R. Kelly’s appeal to overturn his sex crimes conviction was formally rejected by the Supreme Court earlier this week.
According to CNN, the Supreme Court even refused to hear the appeal on Monday (October 7). The embattled singer filed the petition in July, arguing that his crimes occurred decades ago and therefore the charges fell outside the statute of limitations.
Since Kelly was convicted of the incident in the mid-1990s, the singer’s team tried to argue that the Protection Act he was accused of violating did not apply to his case because it did not become law until 2003 — despite Prosecutors successfully argued that the law’s statute of limitations was indefinite.
Kelly’s attorney said the bill’s expanded statute of limitations does not apply to the charges against her client because Congress did not include a provision that would allow the law to apply to conduct alleged before 2003, but only after.
