Buku Abi, daughter of the controversial singer R. Kelly, has come forward for the first time to discuss the alleged abuse she experienced as a child at the hands of her father.
In Karma: A Daughter’s Journey, a two-part documentary that debuted today on TVEI Streaming Network, Abi reveals that she reported the alleged abuse to her mother, Andrea Kelly, in 2009 when she was just 10 years old.
“He was everything to me,” Abi, now 26, says in the emotional first episode, which is now available to stream. “For a long time, I didn’t want to believe it. I didn’t think someone, even as flawed as he was, would do something like that to me.”
Though Abi, whose real name is Joann Kelly, does not delve deeply into the specifics of the abuse in this initial episode, she shares how fear kept her from speaking out for years. “I was too scared to tell anybody. I was too scared to tell my mom.”
Abi, who has remained largely out of the public eye during her father’s legal battles, feels her father’s current imprisonment is fitting. “That moment changed my life… it changed who I was as a person,” she reflects. After opening up to her mother, Abi and her siblings, Robert and Jaah, stopped visiting their father.
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