R Kelly’s daughter says father’s ‘sex abuse’ drove her to attempt suicide as bombshell claims emerge in new documentary

R Kelly‘s daughter has explained 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 disgraced singer abused her when she was eight or nine.

She said she first reported his alleged sexual 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, as well as a stay in a mental hospital.

R Kelly’s daughter Buku Abi, 26, accused him of sexually abusing her when she was just eight or nine in TVEI Streaming Network’s two-episode documentary Karma: A Daughter’s Journey

She said she first reported his alleged abuse to her mother in 2009, when she was around 10 years old; R Kelly is seen in his mugshot from February 22, 2019

‘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 in to the hospital that day, and she stayed for two-and-a-half weeks under frequent 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,’ she said.

But that didn’t end her torment, and her mother noticed another time when they went to Target together that she had self-harmed. 

‘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 (born Joann Kelly) didn’t give specifics of the abuse she allegedly suffered, but she did say prison was a ‘well-suited place’ for her father; pictured in Karma: A Daughter’s Journey trailer

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 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.’

Abi said Kelly’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 that 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.

Abi declined to share details about the abuse she allegedly suffered at the hands of her father in the first episode, which premiered for streaming last Friday.

However, she did say that prison was a ‘well-suited place’ for her father to be, a conclusion she arrived at based on her ‘personal experience’ with him. 

She waited to tell her mother about the alleged abuse, but once she did she and her siblings stopped spending time with their father

She spoke of the ways Kelly’s alleged abuse completely altered the course of her life. In episode two, she recounted through tears how she ‘[woke] up to him touching me’

She spoke of the ways Kelly’s alleged abuse completely altered the course of her life.

Abi added that ‘one millisecond completely changed my whole life and changes who I was as a person and changed the sparkle I had and the light I used to carry.’

In the documentary, she made it clear that her visitations with her father ended after she reported the alleged abuse to her mother, and she said her brother Robert and sister Jaah also stopped going to see him.

But to this day, she ‘still struggle[s] with it a lot’.

Abi revealed more details of her accusations in the second episode. 

‘I just remember waking up to him touching me,’ she recounted through tears. ‘And I didn’t know what to do, so I just kind of laid there, and I pretended to be asleep.’

The songstress said she told her mother — who is also featured in the documentary — what had happened, and the two then filed a police complaint listing her as a ‘Jane Doe.’

However, the delay between when the alleged abuse happened and when Abi told her mother may have scuttled their chances of getting justice.  

‘They couldn’t prosecute him because I waited too long. So at that point in my life, I felt like I said something for nothing,’ she explained.

Abi’s mother Drea Kelly (pictured with ex-husband R. Kelly in the documentary) took her to police to report the alleged crime as a ‘Jane Doe,’ but they were told Kelly couldn’t be prosecuted because too much time had passed

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.

Then, in 2022, he was convicted in a federal trial held in Chicago of six out of 13 charges, including counts for 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, though the judge overseeing the latter 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.

Rumors of Kelly’s alleged abuse of women and young children flourished for years, and they were only exacerbated by his relationship with the singer Aaliyah.

Kelly was later sentenced to 31 years in prison after he was convicted at a trial in New York in 2021 and a federal trial held in Chicago in 2022; pictured in 2017 in Austin, Texas

After working together in the studio, the two had a secret, illegal marriage in 1994. Aaliyah was only 15 at the time, but her age was falsely listed on the marriage certificate as 18. 

During a pre-trial hearing for Kelly’s later case in New York, one of his attorneys admitted to a judge that they would not deny that Kelly had had sex with Aaliyah when she was still underage. 

The latest accusations against R. Kelly come as the rap mogul Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs is currently in federal custody facing sex trafficking charges, as well as several civil suits from women alleging that he sexually assaulted them. 

The accusations swirling around R. Kelly for years solidified in 2019 with the release of the six-hour Lifetime documentary Surviving R. Kelly.

In the wake of the documentary, which delved into the numerous allegations made against him in detail, Kelly record label opted to drop him.

Weeks later, he was hit with criminal charges in Chicago.