Buku Abi, the eldest daughter of singer R Kelly, is opening up on her past traumas at the hands of her disgraced father. In a new docuseries titled Karma: A Daughter’s Journey, the 26-year-old claimed that she was sexually abused by the Burn It Up singer. In the two-part documentary that premiered on TVEI Friday, Buku, formerly known as Joann Kelly, revealed that during her childhood, she once woke up to her father allegedly “touching” her.
R Kelly’s daughter Buku Abi claims disgraced singer sexually abused her as a child
“He was my everything. 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,” Buku said of R Kelly, who was convicted of sex trafficking and racketeering in 2022 and convicted in a separate case for child pornography in 2023.
In the bombshell documentary, the musician explained that after the incident, she was “too scared to tell anybody.” “I was too scared to tell my mom,” Buku said as she went on to provide more insight into her abuse at the hands of her own father, 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,” the Growing Up Hip Hop: Atlanta alumna added, revealing that the incident took place when she was just eight or nine.
She continued to say, “I really feel like that one millisecond completely just changed my whole life and changed who I was as a person and changed the sparkle I had and the light I used to carry.” Buku explained that the abuse caused mental health problems for her and drove her to the point where “I didn’t care anymore. I didn’t care if I lived or died.”
“I remember one day, my mom and I, we went to Target and I had to use the bathroom. We went to the bathroom and she came out and I was washing my hands and she saw that my wrists were all cut up, and she just immediately dropped everything, and she was asking like, ‘What’s going on? Are you OK?’” Buku recalled.
“After I told my mom, I didn’t go over there anymore; my brother [Robert] and sister [Jaah], we didn’t go over there anymore. And even up until now I struggle with it a lot,” she shared.