Grammy Award Winning Artist Accused Of Sexual Assault By Daughter

This horrific allegation comes from the TVEI documentary R. Kelly’s Karma: A Daughter’s Story. In the documentary, his daughter Buku Abi (originally Joanne Kelly) makes the accusation and also elaborates on why it took her so long to process her trauma from the alleged assault. “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.”

R. Kelly’s attorney, Jennifer Bonjean, almost immediately pushed back against this accusation. “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.” The attorney also took aim at the directors of the documentary, essentially accusing them of not getting her client’s side of the story: “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.”

The previous allegations that Bonjean alluded to were those made by R. Kelly’s wife, Andrea Kelly, during their divorce proceedings. When those proceedings began in 2014, she alleged that the singer had molested an anonymous preteen girl back in 2009. Once this allegation went public a few years later, R. Kelly said that it was “100% false.

Meanwhile, Andrea Kelly claimed that a case worker for the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services thought that the anonymous girl’s claims were legitimate but that enough time had gone by that the state had to rule her allegation as “unfounded.” Bringing things full circle, an episode of R. Kelly’s Karma confirmed that the anonymous girl in question was Buku Abi, who is now openly accusing her father of sexually assaulting her when she was younger.

In the second episode of that documentary, she revealed the full extent of these allegations. She said that she was sleeping in her father’s office space because he was having a party and she wanted to be near him, but after falling asleep, “I just remember waking up to him touching me,” Through tears, she explained that she didn’t know what to do, “So I just kinda laid there and I pretended to be asleep.”

Abi felt traumatized by the alleged assault, bottling up her feelings until “it was too much to not talk about.” That was when she told her mother about what happened and confirmed that the state “basically couldn’t prosecute [R. Kelly] because I waited too long.”

This led to new anxiety about putting herself and her mother through additional trauma for no real reason, and this trauma has had profound effects, including her admittance to mental institutions and multiple suicide attempts: “I really feel like that 1 millisecond completely just changed my whole life, and changed who I was as a person and changed the sparkle I had and the light that I used to carry.”

It’s almost impossible to hear these allegations against R. Kelly without thinking of the current allegations against Diddy, who himself is facing (among other charges) accusations of sex trafficking. Hearing more from Kelly’s daughter is a reminder that these famous figures have much more to lose than their money or even their freedom. They can also lose their reputations, and for a celebrity, that can often be a fate worse than death.