R. Kelly’s daughter Buku Abi said she spiraled after her notorious father sexually abused her, leading her to attempt to take her own life multiple times before the age of 10.
“I really feel like that one-millisecond completely just changed my whole life, changed who I was as a person,” Abi said in the documentary R. Kelly’s Karma: A Daughter’s Journey.
“For a long time, I didn’t want to believe that it happened. I didn’t know, even if he was a bad person, that he would do something like this to me.”
Abi said she recalled waking up in the middle of the night to her father “touching” her, “E! News” reported. Frozen with fear, Abi said she “didn’t know what to do, so I just kind of laid there and I pretended to be sleep.”
Abi, whose birth name is Joann Kelly, said she reported the abuse to her mother, Andrea Kelly, at ten years old. But when the two tried to file a police report, they said “they couldn’t prosecute him because I waited too long.”
She said her mother noticed while out shopping that her daughter had mutilated herself. “My mom saw that my wrists were all cut up. She just immediately dropped everything and was asking, ‘What’s going on? Are you okay?’” Abi recalled. “She was really worried, and in that moment, I broke down, and I had to tell her like, ‘I don’t think I’m okay. 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.’”
Eventually, after the suicide attempts, she was admitted to 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,” Abi said in the documentary. “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.”
R. Kelly categorically denies he ever abused her. His attorney, Jennifer Bojean, said in a statement obtained by People that her client was cleared years ago of the accusations.
“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 statement read. “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 or someone you know needs help, call 988 to reach the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline. You can also call the network, previously known as the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline, at 800-273-8255, text HOME to 741741, or visit SpeakingOfSuicide.com/resources for additional resources.
