Kelly’s daughter, Buku Abi, is speaking out publicly for the first time about the alleged ab*se 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, Abi, 26, claims she was ab*sed 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 says in the first episode of the documentary.
“I was too scared to tell anybody. I was too scared to tell my mom.” she added
Though Abi, who was born Joann Kelly, does not go into detail about the alleged ab*se in the first episode, she says 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.”
In the second episode, Buku goes into more detail about the alleged ab*se, which she says happened when she was 8 or 9.
“I just remember waking up to him t0.uching me,” she recalls, crying. “And I didn’t know what to do, so I just kind of laid there, and I pretended to be asleep.”
Buku says she eventually told her mother what happened, and they went to the police and filed a complaint as “Jane Doe,” but, she adds 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.”
In a statement to People, Kelly’s attorney Jennifer Bonjean said, “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 reac