R. Kelly’s Daughter Claims Father’s Abuse Sent Her To A “Psych Ward”

WARNING: This article contains triggering language pertaining to sexual abuse, rape, molestation, and assault.

R. Kelly‘s daughter, Buku Abi, has doubled down on her claims and says her father’s abuse led her to a “psych ward.” People reports that Buku claims to have been molested by the disgraced singer when she was 8. After years of sexual abuse, the woman, who is now 26, stated that she had tried to take her own life to deal with the pain.

Abi, née Joann Kelly, detailed her experience in the new documentary, R. Kelly’s Karma: A Daughter’s Journey, saying, “For a long time I was in a really hard space mentally and so I ended up in a mental hospital, a psych ward, whatever you want to call it…I hit a point in my life where, multiple times, I had tried to take my own life.”

When she was 10-years-old, Joann revealed the hardships to her mother, Andrea Kelly, telling her that she was mentally unwell due to the abuse. The aspiring singer explained that her mother had seen other signs of her daughter being unwell, recalling a moment when Andrea discovered slashes along her wrists.

“She just immediately dropped everything and was asking, ‘What’s going on? Are you OK?’” R. Kelly’s daughter recalled. “She was really worried, and in that moment, I broke down, and I had to tell her like, ‘I don’t think I’m OK. I don’t think that I can do this. I don’t think that I’m going to make it through to live out the rest of my life.’”

“That day she called the hospital, and she ended up checking me in, and I didn’t leave,” Joann said. “I was there for about two and a half weeks. I was on a really hard suicide watch. And then for two, three months after that, I was in outpatient basically, so I had to go there every day.”

Buku Abi previously made headlines after she revealed that her dad sexually abused her when she was a little girl. Abi claimed that she woke up to R. Kelly touching her one night as she pretended to be asleep.

“I didn’t know what to do, so I just kind of laid there, and I pretended to be asleep,” she said in a clip teasing the documentary. “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, that he would do something to me. I was too scared to tell anybody. I was too scared to tell my mom.”

“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,” Buku Abi said of the traumatic experience. “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.”

If you’re thinking about suicide, are worried about a friend or loved one, or would like emotional support, contact the 24-hour National Suicide Prevention Lifeline by dialing 988.