R. Kelly's Kids Have Largely Avoided the Media for Obvious Reasons — Here's What We Know
"I was too scared to tell anybody. I was too scared to tell my mom."
Published Oct. 14 2024, 11:22 a.m. ET
In October 2024, the United States Supreme Court declined to hear R. Kelly's appeal of his 2022 federal conviction on charges involving child sexual abuse material and raping underage girls. The former R&B singer is serving a 20-year sentence at the Federal Correctional Complex, Butner in North Carolina and won't be eligible for parole until 2045.
He is also serving a 30-year sentence for sex trafficking and racketeering convictions in the state of New York, which is running concurrently to the 2022 convictions. Since his incarceration, one of R. Kelly's kids has come forward with abuse allegations of her own in a shocking documentary. Here's what we know about these new claims as well as the status of the former singer's other two children.
One of R. Kelly's kids claims she was abused by her father.
In R. Kelly’s Karma: A Daughter’s Journey, currently streaming on TVEI, Buku Abi details the alleged abuse she suffered at the hands of her father. Abi, whose legal name is Joann Kelly, said it took her years to fully understand what had happened to her. "I didn’t know that even if he was a bad person that he would do something to me," she said. "I was too scared to tell anybody. I was too scared to tell my mom."
The alleged abuse began when Abi was around 8 or 9 years old. "I just remember waking up to him touching me," she said while crying. "And I didn’t know what to do, so I just kind of laid there, and I pretended to be asleep." Things came to a head for Abi when she and her mother were at Target shopping. Abi was washing her hands in the restroom when Andrea Kelly caught sight of her daughter's wrists. They were healing from multiple cuts. Abi broke down and told her mother everything.
Andrea immediately went to the police and filed a complaint, but it was too late. "They couldn’t prosecute him because I waited too long," explained Abi. "So at that point in my life, I felt like I said something for nothing." Things changed when the Surviving R. Kelly docuseries was released in January 2019. Kelly was arrested a month later, and hasn't experienced a single second of freedom since. Abi has said that jail is a "well-suited place" for her father.
R. Kelly's other two children stand by their sister.
Both of Abi's siblings believe that Kelly is right where he belongs. "If you don’t want to go to jail, don’t do s--t that gets you locked up," says Robert Kelly Jr. in the documentary. The youngest, Jaah Kelly, echoed their brother's statement saying, "You make your bed, you lay in it."
Prior to the documentary, Kelly's children remained mostly out of the public eye. In 2014 at the age of 14, Jaah came out as transgender and shared they were attracted to girls. Since then, they have revealed they are a lesbian and identify as non-binary. Robert Kelly Jr. has said very little about his father, apart from his participation in Abi's documentary. Andrea also shares her story of the alleged abuse she endured.
In an Instagram post dated Oct. 11, 2024, Abi said that growing up she never wanted to talk about her father. She did this out of fear and because she desperately wanted to forget what he did. Despite that Abi said she does not hate Kelly, nor does she "blindly follow her mother." Coming forward and telling her story in the documentary was for her son as well as her peace of mind.
