R. Kelly's daughter claims he sexually abused her as a child and it made her attempt suicide 'multiple times'
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Kelly's daughter Buku Abi, also known as Joann Kelly, now 26, claimed she woke up to the singer touching her when she was eight or nine years old, and then she pretended to be asleep. She made the accusation while speaking in TVEI Network's new two-part documentary "Karma: A Daughter’s Journey."
She also said that the incident set off a domino effect of trauma for her which included multiple suicide attempts and a stay in a psychiatric 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.
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Hide AdSpeaking further about her time in hospital, she said: “I was there for about two and a half weeks. 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 initially reported the abuse to her mother, Kelly's ex-wife choreographer, dancer, and actress Andrea, in 2009. Together, they filed a complaint as "Jane Doe", but the statute of limitations had run out. "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,” Abi, identified as Joanne Kelly in the documentary, claimed.
She later told of the fear she felt in her own home and added: “I was too scared to tell anybody. I was too scared to tell my mum.”


Explaining how she came to tell her mum of the alleged abuse, Abi 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.
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Hide Ad“[My mum] saw that my wrists were all cut up, and she just immediately dropped everything and was asking ‘what’s going on? Are you okay?’ 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.' ”
Andrea, known professionally as Drea, also appears in the documentary and backs up her daughter’s claims of abuse. The star, who was married to rapper and singer Kelly between 1996 and 2009, also blasted him for not allegedly not trying during their 15-year marriage.


Abi added that her suicidal thoughts caused her a “lot of guilt,” as she could see the impact they had on her younger siblings Jaah, now aged 23, and Robert Junior, now 22.
Robert is also interviewed in the documentary. He said: “That was definitely scary, waking up and not knowing, is my sister going to be alive? ... 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 mum.”
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Hide AdAlso in the documentary, Abi recalls that just "one millisecond" changed her entire life. She also vowed to tell her son the truth about his grandfather, but said she will never take her son to the prison to meet him as he serves his 20-year sentence.
Kelly's attorney Jennifer Bonjean told TMZ Hip Hop: "Mr. Kelly vehemently denies these 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 added: “The 'filmmakers' whoever they are did not reach out to Mr. Kelly or his team to even allow him to deny these hurtful claims.”
In 2021 and 2022 fallen star R. Kelly, who was once known as the ‘King of R&B’, was convicted on multiple charges involving child sexual abuse. As of 2024, he is serving a 31-year combined sentence at FCI Butner Medium I in North Carolina, United States.