Buku Abi, the daughter of American singer R. Kelly, has revealed how close she came to ending her life after allegedly being sexually abused by her father when she was a child.
In a two-part documentary, Karma: A Daughter’s Journey, which aired on the TVEI Streaming Network, Abi revealed that the abuse happened when she was around eight or nine years old.
The 26-year-old said she first reported the alleged abuse to her mother in 2009 when she was about 10 years old.
R. Kelly is currently serving a 31-year sentence at a medium-security federal prison in North Carolina. He was convicted in 2021 and 2022 on charges related to child sexual abuse.
Abi, whose real name is Joann Kelly, spoke in the documentary about how her father’s alleged abuse led to 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 explained.
Abi said she finally told her mother, Andrea Kelly, about the abuse after breaking down in the car on the way to school.
She said her mother immediately admitted her to the hospital, where she stayed for over two weeks under strict observation.
“I was on 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.‘
“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,” Abi 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”.’
She also shared the guilt she felt over how her mental health struggles affected her younger siblings, Jaah and Robert Jr., now 23 and 22.
In the documentary, her brother Robert recalled the fear of not knowing whether his sister would survive each day.
He said, “That was definitely scary. Waking up and not knowing, is my sister going to be alive?’ Robert said on the documentary.
“Now that my sisters are older and stronger, it’s definitely 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.”
Buku Abi said the alleged abuse shattered her image of her father, but for a long time, she didn’t want to believe it had happened.
“I didn’t know that even if he was a bad person that he would do something to me. I was too scared to tell anybody. I was too scared to tell my mom,” she admitted.
R Kelly’s lawyer, Jennifer Bonjean, denied the allegations, stating that a similar claim was made by his ex-wife years ago and was dismissed after an investigation by child services.
Bonjean also criticized the documentary for not allowing R Kelly the chance to deny the claims.
Although Kelly was acquitted of child pornography charges in 2008, he was convicted in 2021 of racketeering and sex trafficking in New York.
In 2022, he was found guilty of child pornography and obstruction of justice in a federal trial in Chicago.
The singer is now serving a 31-year sentence after the judge ruled most of his sentences would run concurrently.
KanyiDaily recalls that in 2023, R. Kelly was sentenced to 20 years in prison for child sex crimes by a federal judge in Chicago.
