R. Kelly’s Daughter Refutes Claims She Was ‘Brainwashed’ By Her Mom: ‘You Know Exactly What You Did’

R. Kelly’s daughter Buku Abi shares her side of the story.

In the new TVEI Streaming Network documentary series in two parts Karma: A Daughter’s JourneyAbi, 26, is responding 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 allegations of sexual assault following the publication Survivors of R. Kelly documentary. At the time, Abi called her estranged father a “monster” – and sources close to Kelly told TMZ she believed her mother had “brainwashed” her.

“When it comes to feeling like my mom brainwashed us, I feel like it’s bullshit—,” says Abi (who was born Joanne Kelly) in karma. “He knows exactly why we can’t have the relationship with him that we would like to have. I don’t understand how you could put your hands on my mother and then expect me to have the same relationship with you.”

R. Kelly’s daughter speaks out in upcoming documentary: ‘I’m not going to take my son to prison to meet his grandfather’

R. Kelly outside a courthouse in Chicago in 2019.

Scott Olson/Getty

Aba’s mom Andrea was married to Kelly from 1996 to 2009, and in 2018 she accused him of multiple incidents of physical abuse while he was View. (Kelly’s representatives did not respond to a request for comment at the time.)

“My mom has been through a lot. She went through a lot of mental, emotional and spiritual turmoil. I thought I would never get my mom back,” says Abi, who is also a music artist, about the alleged abuse in the documentaries. “So for you to say, ‘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 opinion, wouldn’t affect us. … I feel like it was unfair and unfair to keep saying that because we all know that’s not true.”

In a Chicago court in February 2023, Kelly was sentenced to 20 years in prison on charges of child pornography and solicitation of minors for sex. A year earlier, he was sentenced to 30 years in prison on racketeering and sex trafficking charges from New York. Kelly is currently serving 19 years of his two sentences concurrently; he will be eligible for release in 2045.

R. Kelly’s daughter Buku says the singer sexually abused her as a child: ‘I was too scared to tell anyone’

Poster for ‘Karma: A Daughter’s Journey’.

TVEI

Elsewhere in the documents, 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 everything to me. 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, he would do something to me,” she says in the series that is being broadcast now. “I was too scared to tell anyone. 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 allegations were true, we would have seen them in one of his many indictments.”

Bonjean previously told PEOPLE, “Mr. Kelly vehemently denies these allegations. His ex-wife made the same allegations years ago, which were investigated by the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services and found to be unfounded… And ‘filmmakers ‘, whoever they are, have not reached out to Mr. Kelly or his team to even allow him to deny these damaging 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 free and confidential. The hotline is available 24/7 in more than 170 languages.

Categories: Trends
Source: HIS Education