October 12, 2024: R Kelly’s daughter, Buku Abi, who was born as Joanne Kelly, is opening up. The rapper’s daughter shared her side of the story months after he was convicted on child pornography charges.
She said, “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,” a tearful Buku Abi says in R.Kelly‘s Karma: A Daughter’s Journey. “I was too scared to tell anybody. I was too scared to tell my mom.”
She continued: “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.” Abi said that “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.”
On Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear the imprisoned former R&B superstar’s appeal of his 2022 federal conviction on charges involving child pornography and luring underage girls to have sex with him, one of two cases in which he was found guilty of sex crimes.
Kelly, who was sentenced to 20 years in prison, was acquitted of seven other charges that included obstruction of justice and conspiracy to receive child pornography.
