R. Kelly‘s daughter with wife Andrea Kelly has opened up about the sexual abuse she allegedly suffered at her father’s hands in a new documentary about the singer.
On Friday (October 11), TVEI Networks released the first of a two-part expose about Kelly and his relationship with his children titled Karma: A Daughter’s Journey. Per TMZ, the film finds his daughter Buku Abi (born Joanne Kelly), sharing details about an incident she says occurred when she was around the age of eight or nine.
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The now 26-year-old claims that she woke up to find R. Kelly touching her and pretended to be asleep. In a trailer for the documentary, Abi is heard alluding to the life-shattering moment.
“He was my everything. For a long time, I didn’t even wanna believe that it happened,” she says while crying. “I didn’t know that even if he was a bad person, that he would do something to me. I really feel like that one millisecond completely just changed my whole life.”
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Elsewhere in the trailer — which also features her mother and her brother, Robert Kelly Jr. — Buku Abi says that she will not be taking her son to visit her father and sheds more light on their fractured relationship, which he has previously blamed on his ex-wife.
“Nobody wants to be the child of the father that is out here hurting women and children,” she says, later adding, “He knows exactly why we can’t have the relationship that we would have liked to have with him.”
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While she may be speaking about this alleged incident publicly for the first time, this is not the first time Joanne Kelly has made these accusations.
According to TMZ, she told her mother about the incident in 2009, roughly two years after it happened. Andrea Kelly filed a complaint at the time, listing her daughter as Jane Doe; however they were told the statute of limitation had passed.
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In a statement to the outlet, R. Kelly’s attorney Jennifer Bonjean said that he “vehemently denies these allegations.”
“His ex wife made the same allegation years ago,” Bonjean wrote, “and it was investigated by the Illinois Department of Children & Family Services and was unfounded … 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.”
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Back in 2022, a grand jury found R. Kelly guilty on six of the 13 federal charges he was facing, which included three child pornography charges for sexually abusing four girls — three of whom were minors.
They also found the Chicago native guilty of making videos of himself sexually assaulting his 14-year-old goddaughter, which resulted in another three charges for producing sex tapes with a minor.
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He was sentenced to 20 years behind bars by a Chicago judge. Kelly, however, scored a victory when the judge ruled that all but one year would be served concurrent to the 30-year sentence he’s currently serving in New York on racketeering charges.
Earlier this week, however, R. Kelly‘s appeal to overturn his sex crime convictions was officially denied by the Supreme Court.
According to CNN, the Supreme Court declined to even hear the appeal on Monday (October 7). The embattled singer submitted his petition back in July, arguing the fact that his crimes occurred decades ago and the charges therefore fall outside the statute of limitations.
Because Kelly was convicted for incidents dating back to the mid 1990s, the singer’s team tried to argue that the PROTECT Act, which he was charged with violating, doesn’t apply to his case since it didn’t become a law until 2003 — despite prosecutors successfully arguing that the law’s statue of limitations are indefinite.
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Kelly’s attorney said that the Act’s expanded statute of limitations doesn’t apply to the charges against her client, as Congress didn’t include a clause allowing the law to be applied to alleged conduct committed before 2003 — only after.
