’FESS UP: Chaneya Kelly (left) wrote letters to jailed dad Daryl (holding her son Julian) saying her mom forced her to say he raped her as a child. (Courtesy Kelly family)
She sent her dad to prison — and now she’s hoping these letters get him out.
A woman whose childhood rape testimony against her upstate father got him sentenced to up to 40 years in prison wrote him a series of letters confessing she was forced to lie by her abusive mother.
“I didn’t want to get beat so I made up a lie that I’d take back anyday. I regret everything I said,” Chaneya Kelly, now 24, wrote to dad Daryl in a 2002 letter obtained by The Post.
“It’s just that I didn’t want to get beaten by a ‘drunken’ mother.”
Daryl Kelly, now 54, was convicted in 1998 of raping, sodomizing and sexually abusing Chaneya in their Newburgh home — largely due to her testimony as an 9-year-old.
He’s currently serving a 20- to 40-year sentence, and isn’t eligible for parole until 2018.
In her 2002 letter, Chaneya said she should be the one behind bars.
“I feel guilty when I talk about it. I feel that I should be in prison instead of you,” she wrote.
In another letter, dated Oct. 2, 2006, Chaneya said she wished she “could change the past,” and noted the irony “that mommy would have been locked up for perjury charges” if Chaneya had only told the truth. That letter is signed “Daddy’s Big Girl, Neya.”
Daryl Kelly’s appeals have repeatedly been turned down, but his case is under review by the District Attorneys Association of the State of New York.
He’s also now being represented by Peter Cross, the lawyer who last year helped win the release of Eric Glisson after 16-plus years in the slammer following his wrongful conviction of murdering a Bronx livery driver in 1985.
If the pending review doesn’t clear Kelly, Cross said he’ll use Chaneya’s letters for an appeal.
Chaneya has tried to retract her allegations since shortly after her dad’s conviction, including a 1999 affidavit in which she said she testified falsely “because my mother was angry and I was afraid of her.”
Her mom, Charade Kelly, also signed a sworn statement saying that Daryl “should not have been prosecuted” because Chaneya “never said her father did anything to her until I said it to her first.”
In January of last year, Chaneya sent a desperate letter to Gov. Cuomo, saying, “I did what any other eight year old would do.”
“Until this day, I regret that decision, I wish I would have taken that beating,” she added.
But Chaneya yesterday told The Post that her dad doesn’t blame her, saying that when she first visited him in jail, “the first thing he did was hug me and tell me that he loved me and that none of this is my fault.”