R Kelly’s daughter has opened up on how close she came to suicide after her father allegedly molested her when she was a child.
Buku Abi, 26, said in TVEI Streaming Network’s two-episode documentary Karma: A Daughter’s Journey the singer abused her when she was eight or nine.
She said she first reported his alleged s3xual abuse to her mother in 2009 when she was about 10.
Kelly is serving a 31-year sentence at a medium-security federal prison in North Carolina after he was convicted in 2021 and 2022 of child sexual abuse charges.
Abi, born Joann Kelly, told the documentary her father’s alleged abuse triggered multiple suicide attempts and a stay in a mental hospital.
‘For a long time I was in a really hard space mentally and so I ended up in a mental hospital, a psych ward, whatever you want to call it… because I hit a point in my life where multiple times, I had tried to take my own life,’ she said.
Abi said she finally confessed to her mother Andrea Kelly when she broke down crying in the car on the way to school.
Andrea checked her into the hospital that day, and she stayed for two-and-a-half weeks under frequent observation.
‘I was on a really hard suicide watch. And then for two, three months after that, I was in outpatient basically, so I had to go there every day,’ she said.
‘I just got to a point where I didn’t care anymore. I didn’t care if I lived or died. I didn’t care about what happened to me,’ she said.
‘She just immediately dropped everything and was asking, “What’s going on? Are you OK?”
‘She was really worried, and in that moment, I broke down, and I had to tell her like, “I don’t think I’m OK. I don’t think that I can do this. I don’t think that I’m going to make it through to live out the rest of my life”.’
Abi said she felt extremely guilty about the effect her deep depression had on her younger siblings Jaah and Robert Jr – now 23 and 22.
‘That was scary. Waking up and not knowing, is my sister going to be alive?’ Robert said in the documentary.
‘Now that my sisters are older and stronger, it’s subsided, but I still have my moments when they go through something hard.
‘It’s always triggering because you never know what could be someone’s last straw, and I’ve seen both of them get very close to their last straws, including my mom.’
Abi said her father’s alleged sexual abuse shattered her image of her father, and for a long time, she didn’t want to believe it happened.
‘I didn’t know that even if he was a bad person he would do something to me,’ she said of her father in the first episode of the documentary.
‘I was too scared to tell anybody. I was too scared to tell my mom,’ she admitted.
Kelly’s attorney Jennifer Bonjean said his client vehemently denied the allegations.
‘His ex-wife made the same allegation years ago, and it was investigated by the Illinois Department of Children & Family Services and was unfounded,’ she said.
‘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.’
Although Kelly evaded prison when he was acquitted of child pornography charges in 2008, he was later convicted in 2021 of all nine racketeering and sex trafficking charges in New York.
In 2022, he was convicted in a federal trial held in Chicago of six out of 13 charges, including counts of child pornography and obstruction of justice.
He was sentenced to 30 years in prison in his New York trial and 20 years in the later Chicago federal trial. However, the judge overseeing the case ruled that 19 of those 20 years would be served concurrently with his earlier sentence, meaning he has an effective sentence of 31 years now.