Photo Credit:TVEI Network
Buku Abi, born Joanne Kelly is now opening up about the abuse she faced at a young age. The now 26 year old daughter of disgraced singer, R. Kelly reveals in a new documentary, ‘R. Kelly’s Karma: A daughter’s journey,’ that her life was altered forever when the singer snuck into her room when she was around 8 or 9 and touched her inappropriately.
“He was my everything. For a long time, I didn’t want to believe it had happened. I didn’t know even if he was a bad person that he would do something to me,” she says in the documentary. “I was too scared to tell anybody. I was too scared to tell my mom.” She claims that incident changed her whole life, the person she was and the sparkle and light she used to carry. She says that after she told her mother, she did not go to her father’s house anymore and until now, she struggles with it a lot.
She went ahead to explain the incident in detail, saying, “I just remember waking up to him touching me and I didn’t know what to do, so I just kind of laid there and I pretended to be asleep.” Buku claims when she tried to file an anonymous police report, no action was taken because the statute of limitations had passed. After her father wasn’t persecuted, she claims, “So at that point of my life, I felt like I said something for nothing.”
After the snippet of the documentary went viral, R. Kelly’s lawyer made a statement to PEOPLE. “Mr. Kelly vehemently denies these allegations. His ex-wife made the same allegations years ago and it was investigated by the Illinois Department of children and family services and it was unfounded… and the ‘filmmakers’, whoever they are, did not reach out to Mr. Kelly or his team to even allow him deny these hurtful claims.”
