‘I Was Too Scared to Tell Anybody’
R. Kelly’s daughter Buku Abi is speaking out publicly for the first time about the alleged abuse she suffered during her childhood at the hands of her father, Media Take Out has learned.
During the final minutes of EI Streaming Network’s new two-episode documentary Karma: A Daughter’s Journey, which premiered yesterday, Abi, 26, says that she was abused by the singer as a child, and first reported it to her mother Andrea in 2009, when she was 10 years old.
“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, the first episode of which is streaming now. “I was too scared to tell anybody. I was too scared to tell my mom.”
Abi, who was born Joann Kelly, does not go into detail about the alleged abuse , she says that she believes jail is a “well-suited place” for Kelly, 57, to be, as she knows from her “personal experience.”
“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.”