R. Kelly’s daughter Buku Abi is sharing her side of the story.
In TVEI Streaming Network’s new two-part docuseries Karma: A Daughter’s Journey, Abi, 26, responds to claims that her mother, Andrea Kelly, brainwashed her and the disgraced R&B singer’s children against him.
The claims came in 2019, when Kelly was facing sexual abuse allegations following the release of the Surviving R. Kelly documentary. At the time, Abi called her estranged father a “monster” — and sources close to Kelly told TMZ he believed she had been “brainwashed” by her mother.
“When it comes to him feeling as if my mom has brainwashed us, I feel like it’s bull—-,” Abi (who was born Joanne Kelly) says in Karma. “He knows exactly why we can’t have the relationship that we would’ve liked to have with him. I don’t understand how you could put your hands on my mother and then expect me to be able to have the same relationship with you.”
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Abi’s mom Andrea was married to Kelly from 1996 to 2009 and, in 2018, accused him of multiple incidents of physical abuse while on The View. (Kelly’s reps did not respond to a request for comment at the time.)
“My mom went through a lot. She went through a lot of mental and emotional and spiritual turmoil. I thought I was never going to get my mama back,” Abi, who’s also a musical artist, says of the alleged abuse in the docuseries. “So for you to say like, ‘Oh, she’s brainwashing them.’ It’s like no, you know exactly what you did. And I just don’t see how that, in his mind, wouldn’t affect us. … I feel like it was unfair and it’s unfair to continue to say that because we all know it’s not true.”
In a Chicago courthouse in February 2023, Kelly was sentenced to 20 years in prison on charges of child pornography and enticement of minors for sex. One year earlier, he was sentenced to 30 years in prison for racketeering and sex trafficking charges based out of New York. Kelly is currently serving 19 years of his two sentences concurrently; he will be eligible for release in 2045.
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Elsewhere in the docuseries, Abi claims that the “Ignition (Remix)” singer sexually abused her as a child and that she first reported it to her mother in 2009, when she was 10 years old.
“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,” she says in the series, now streaming. “I was too scared to tell anybody. I was too scared to tell my mom.”
In a statement to PEOPLE, Kelly’s attorney Jennifer Bonjean said, “Mr. Kelly is the most investigated person on the planet when it comes to allegations of child sexual abuse. If the claims had merit, we would have seen them in one of his many indictments.”
Bonjean previously told PEOPLE in a statement, “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…. 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.”
If you suspect child abuse, call the Childhelp National Child Abuse Hotline at 1-800-4-A-Child or 1-800-422-4453, or go to www.childhelp.org. All calls are toll-free and confidential. The hotline is available 24/7 in more than 170 languages.
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