R. Kelly’s daughter, Joann, wants to keep her son away from the fallen R&B star.
Joann, 26, spoke about her father, 57, in a new documentary, “R. Kelly’s Karma: A Daughter’s Journey.” The trailer for the film dropped Sunday. In it, Joann shares how her father’s sex crimes convictions turned her world upside down.
“Nobody wants to be the child of the father that is out here hurting women and children,” Joann said. “He knows exactly why we can’t have the relationship that we would have liked to have with him.”
“He was my everything,” she added tearfully. “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.”
Things changed suddenly for Joann after Kelly’s conviction. “I really feel like that one millisecond completely just changed my whole life,” she said.
As for her son, Joann has no intention of ever taking him to see Kelly in prison.
“If my son asks questions, I’m going to be as truthful as possible,” she shared. “And I will not be taking my son to prison to meet his grandfather.”
Joann’s mother and Kelly’s ex-wife, Drea, 50, is also featured in the documentary’s trailer.
“Just because you’re not a good husband, doesn’t mean you can’t be a good father,” Drea said of Kelly, noting that “he didn’t even try.”
“What he did to me, he did to me. But you didn’t have to do it to my damn kids.”
The documentary will also include interviews with Joann’s siblings, Jaah Kelly and Robert Kelly Jr.
In 2008, R. Kelly was acquitted in a child pornography case; however, the singer was arrested by federal authorities in 2019. Prosecutors alleged that R. Kelly and his team “traveled throughout the United States and abroad to perform at concert venues … and to recruit women and girls to engage in illegal sexual activity with Kelly.”
In 2021, the “I Believe I Can Fly” musician was convicted of racketeering and sex-trafficking charges by a federal jury. He was sentenced to 30 years in prison.
on six of the 13 counts that Kelly had faced, including three child porn charges.
The following year, R. Kelly was also convicted on six of the 13 counts he faced, including three child porn charges, during a separate Chicago trial. A judge later sentenced him to 20 years, with 19 to run concurrently with his previous 30-year sentence.
In April, a federal appeals court upheld Kelly’s 2022 conviction, rejecting the singer’s argument that a shorter statute of limitations law should have been applied to his case.
“R. Kelly’s Karma: A Daughter’s Journey” airs Oct. 11 on the Tvei Network.
