R. Kelly's daughter says he sexually abused her as a child

R. Kelly is in jail at the moment, and will likely be there for some time, what with him currently in the midst of serving a 31-year prison sentence on charges of racketeering and production of child pornography. And while his legal team recently made headlines with efforts to get that latter charge (and the two decades or so it added to his sentence) appealed, this week’s latest news about the rapper isn’t likely to help in that effort: Kelly’s daughter, Joann Kelly (also known as Buku Abi, and whose name is spelled as Joanne in the following trailer), has now appeared in a documentary in which she alleges that Kelly sexually abused her when she was a child.

The younger Kelly appeared in R. Kelly’s Karma: A Daughter’s Journey, a new two-part documentary airing on small-scale independent streaming network TVEI. Featuring appearances from Joann, her brother Robert Jr., and their mother, Drea (who also appeared in 2019’s Surviving R. Kelly, the docuseries that helped shift the consensus on Kelly), the documentary includes Joann Kelly’s allegations that her father sexually abused her. “For a long time,” she says, “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. I was too scared to tell anybody. I was too scared to tell my mom.” Kelly goes on to say that, when she was 8 or 9 years old, she woke up to her father touching her inappropriately, and says she pretended to be asleep. She told her mother for the first time about the abuse when she was 10 years old, she says in the documentary, but says that by the time the family reported the incident, authorities told them it had been too long since it had happened.

Per People, Kelly’s lawyer responded to the allegations in the documentary with a statement of denial: “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.”

[via THR]