R Kelly’s daughter Joanne will speak out about her disgraced father in a new documentary.
The feature-length documentary features “raw and emotional” interviews with Joanne and her siblings Jaah Kelly and Robert Kelly Jr as well as their mother Drea Kelly, who was married to R Kelly from 1996 to 2009. Together, they speak about the “dark reality of living in the shadow of one of the most notorious figures in music.”
“Nobody wants to be the child of the father that is out here hurting women and children,” Joanne says in the film’s trailer.
“He knows exactly why we can’t have the relationship that we would have liked to have with him,” she says, tearfully adding: “He was my everything.”
The film’s official logline says that in the film, Joanne will share “a heartbreaking secret that shattered her childhood and changed her forever.”
“For a long time, I didn’t even want to believe that it happened,” she continues in the trailer. “I didn’t know that, even if he was a bad person, that he would do something to me.”
“Just because you’re not a good husband doesn’t mean you can’t be a good father – and the fact that he doesn’t even try,” Drea adds. “What he did to me, he did to me. But you didn’t have to do it to my damn kids.”
Earlier this year, a federal appellate court in Chicago upheld R. Kelly‘s conviction and 20-year prison sentence for possessing child pornography and child enticement.
The disgraced singer was found guilty of six of 13 counts of owning and producing child pornography and enticing a minor back in September. On Thursday (February 23), he was sentenced to 20 years in prison but he will serve almost all of his sentence simultaneously alongside the jail term he received last year for racketeering and trafficking.
The additional sentence means that in total, Kelly will now serve 31 years in prison and he will not be eligible for release until he is 80 years old.
At the beginning of the year, a final instalment of the Surviving R. Kelly docuseries aired on Lifetime, covering Kelly’s 2022 federal trial. The docuseries also examined the role played by those around Kelly who enabled him, either by turning a blind eye to his abuse over three decades or helping him see his victims, such as by booking flights for underage girls to travel across state lines.
It also examined Kelly’s marriage with the late singer Aaliyah, revealing that he silenced her and her family with a non-disclosure agreement after the annulment of their marriage, which took place when Aaliyah was 15 with her age falsified as 18 on the marriage certificate.