R. Kelly with his daughter Buku in this picture cover of a documentary produced by the TVEI streaming site on Instagram, and Reuters.
R. Kelly, the singer behind the inspirational megahit “I Believe I Can Fly,” and who is trying to dodge multiple sex abuse and child pornography cases, is facing yet another abuse raps, this time from his own daughter.
Buku Abi, Kelly’s daughter with his ex-wife Andrea, revealed the secret she had been keeping for the longest time — 18 years, to be exact — that she had been sexually abused by her own father at the tender age of eight. Abi’s revelation was contained in a two-part documentary titled Karma: A Daughter’s Journey, by TVEI streaming network.
Narrating how the alleged abuse took place, Abi, now 26, claimed that she was sleeping when the R&B singer came to her bedside and did the unthinkable. It would take another two years before she decided to tell her mother about the abuse. Their effort to file a complaint before the police, however, did not prosper.
“He was my everything. For a long time, I didn’t even wanna believe it happened. I didn’t know that even if he was a bad person that he would do something to me… it completely just changed my whole life,” she said in the two-minute official trailer.
“I was too scared to tell anybody. I was too scared to tell my mom,” Abi, who was born Joann Kelly, further said.
Abi described Kelly as a “monster” who deserved what is now happening to him. “What he has done to those kids, there’s no other words for him — he’s a monster,” she claimed.
When she and her mother went to the police, the case was docketed with her identified as “Jane Doe,” but it was eventually dismissed for missing the prescriptive period with which to file the case.
A lawyer for Kelly has denied the allegations.
Kelly, a Chicago native who soared to global stardom in the 1990s, faced a slew of sex abuse allegations and was sentenced to 20 years in prison on child sex convictions, a federal appeals court ruled back in April.
The appeals court sustained the ruling of jurors in 2022 who convicted the Grammy Award-winning singer, born Robert Sylvester Kelly, on three charges of producing child sexual abuse images and three charges of enticement of minors for sex.
It also rejected Kelly’s argument that he should not have been prosecuted since the allegations occurred while Illinois law required prosecution of child sex crime charges within 10 years. The panel labeled it an attempt by Kelly to elude the charges entirely after “employing a complex scheme to keep victims quiet.”