"That 1 millisecond completely just changed my whole life," Buku Abi says in a new documentary. Kelly has denied the allegations.
R. Kelly, the disgraced R&B star who is behind bars in federal prison after being convicted of racketeering and sex trafficking in 2021, is being publicly accused of sexually abusing his daughter when she was a child.
Buku Abi, who was born Joanne Kelly, voices her allegations against the "I Believe I Can Fly" singer in the new TVEI documentary R. Kelly's Karma: A Daughter's Story. "It was really hard. He was my everything," Abi, 26, says in the first episode of the two-part doc. "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."
Kelly's attorney Jennifer Bonjean didn't immediately respond to Entertainment Weekly's request for comment Friday, but she denied Abi's claims in a statement to PEOPLE. "Mr. Kelly vehemently denies these allegations," Bonjean said. "His ex-wife made the same allegation years ago, and it was investigated by the Illinois Department of Children & Family Services and was unfounded... And the 'filmmakers,' whoever they are, did not reach out to Mr. Kelly or his team to even allow him to deny these hurtful claims."
Andrea Kelly, Abi's mother and R. Kelly's ex-wife, accused the singer of molesting an anonymous preteen girl in 2009 in a 2014 filing from the couple's divorce proceedings that was unsealed in 2019 or 2020. Kelly's attorney said the allegation was "100% false" when the allegation was publicized in 2020.
Andrea Kelly claimed the filing that an Illinois Department of Children and Family Services caseworker believed the anonymous girl's allegations but had to classify them as "unfounded" due to the amount of time between the alleged incident and its reporting. R. Kelly's Karma identifies Abi as the Jane Doe in this case.
In the second episode of R. Kelly's Karma, Abi emotionally details the alleged abuse, which she says occurred when she was 8 or 9 years old. "He was having a party, and I didn't want to be without him, so instead of sleeping in my room, I decided to sleep in his office space that was near the party," she recalls tearfully. "And just, I remember falling asleep, and it had to be like 3 or 4 in the morning, and I just remember waking up to him touching me and I didn't know what to do. So I just kinda laid there and I pretended to be asleep."
Abi says she immediately felt the weight of the situation. "I just remember from that moment on, I was a different person. I wasn't the same," she says. "But I was too scared to tell anybody, so it was hard to even accept that it happened. So for a long time I just tried to put it somewhere else. But it got to a point where it was too much. It was too much to not talk about. It was too much to not deal with, so I had to tell my mom."
Abi says she told her mother about the alleged abuse in 2009, when she was 10. "When I told her, it completely broke her heart," she recalls, adding that she stopped seeing her father regularly after talking with her mother. "He was my everything, and so after that day, after I told my mom, I didn't go over there anymore. My brother and sister, we didn't go over there anymore. And even up until now, I struggle with it a lot. I struggle with not ever wanting to talk to him again, but then wanting to because [he's] my dad."
Abi, who is a musician, says in the doc that she was overwhelmed by the legal proceedings after sharing her story with her mother. "I had to talk to officers and counselors, and all these people about what happened, but because I waited so long to say anything, they really couldn't do anything about it," she says. "My mom had to go to court for me. They basically couldn't prosecute him because I waited too long, so at that point in my life, I felt like I said something for nothing. I felt like it was a waste of time. And I felt like I was putting my mom through so much for nothing."
Kelly's daughter says she spent time in a mental institution and attempted suicide multiple times as a result of the alleged abuse. "I really feel like that 1 millisecond completely just changed my whole life, and changed who I was as a person and changed the sparkle I had and the light that I used to carry," she says.
Kelly, 57, is currently serving a 30-year prison sentence after being found guilty of racketeering and eight violations of an anti-sex-trafficking law. During his trial, witnesses testified that they saw Kelly sexually abuse the late singer Aaliyah when she was a young teenager. Kelly denied all allegations of abuse, and his attorneys argued that all the sexual encounters with his accusers were consensual.
Kelly previously went to court in 2008 for child pornography charges stemming from the infamous 2002 video of the musician allegedly urinating on an underage girl. He pleaded not guilty and was acquitted.
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After extensive reports of sexual abuse allegations from Buzzfeed News and from Lifetime's Surviving R. Kelly docuseries, Kelly was charged with 10 counts of aggravated criminal sexual abuse against four victims (three of whom were minors at the time) in Illinois in 2019.
Several other cases and allegations followed, including a Chicago federal case in which Kelly was convicted of producing child pornography and child enticement. The singer was sentenced to an additional 20 years in that case, though all but one of those years will be served concurrently with his 30-year prison sentence. Earlier this week, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear Kelly's appeal in the Chicago case.
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