Kelly’s daughter, Buku Abi, has opened up publicly for the first time about the alleged sexual abuse she suffered during her childhood at the hands of her father.
In a two-episode documentary Karma: A Daughter’s Journey, which premiered on October 11, the 26-year-old, claimed that she was abused by her father as a child, and she first reported it to her mother Andrea 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 he would do something to me,” she revealed in the first episode of the documentary.
“I was too scared to tell anybody. I was too scared to tell my mom.” she continued.
Though Abi, who was born Joann Kelly, did not go into detail about the alleged abuse in the first episode, she added that she believes jail is a “well-suited place” for Kelly, 57, to be, as she knows from her “personal experience.”
“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,” she says. “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. And even up until now, I struggle with it a lot.” She added.
In the second episode, Buku goes into more detail about the alleged abuse, which she says happened when she was 8 or 9.
“I just remember waking up to him touching me,” she recalled, crying. “And I didn’t know what to do, so I just kind of laid there, and I pretended to be asleep.”
She disclosed that she eventually told her mother what transpired, and they went to the police and filed a complaint as “Jane Doe,” but, she added in the documentary, “They couldn’t prosecute him because I waited too long. So at that point in my life, I felt like I said something for nothing.”
Meanwhile, in a statement to People, Kelly’s attorney Jennifer Bonjean said, “Mr. Kelly vehemently denies these allegations.
Recall that his ex-wife made the same allegation years ago, and it was investigated by the Illinois Department of Children & Family Services and was unfounded.
