Duffy was ‘raped, drugged and held captive for days’
Singer makes public reappearance with moving story
Duffy has revealed she was raped, drugged and held captive over several days at some point over the last decade. The singer opened up about the harrowing experience in an Instagram post yesterday.
“The truth is, and please trust me I am ok and safe now, I was raped and drugged and held captive over some days,” she wrote. “Of course I survived. The recovery took time. There’s no light way to say it. But I can tell you in the last decade, the thousands and thousands of days I committed to wanting to feel the sunshine in my heart again, the sun does now shine.”
Duffy rose to global fame in 2008 with the hit song “Mercy”. She released her album Rockferry that year, followed by Endlessly in 2010. Despite her success, the Welsh singer didn’t release any studio album after that, prompting some to wonder why she had gone silent.
“You can only imagine the amount of times I thought about writing this. The way I would write it, how I would feel thereafter,” she wrote. “Well, not entirely sure why now is the right time, and what it is that feels exciting and liberating for me to talk. I cannot explain it. Many of you wonder what happened to me, where did I disappear to and why.”
The singer explained that a journalist had found a way to contact her and that she shared her story with him over the summer. “He was kind and it felt so amazing to finally speak,” she added.
Duffy said that she didn’t “user [her] voice to express [her] pain” because she ”did not want to show the world the sadness in [her] eyes”.
“I asked myself, how can I sing from the heart if it is broken? And slowly it unbroke,” she wrote. “In the following weeks I will be posting a spoken interview. If you have any questions I would like to answer them, in the spoken interview, if I can. I have a sacred love and sincere appreciation for your kindness over the years. You have been friends. I want to thank you for that.”
Over the course of her career, Duffy won the Grammy Award for Best Pop Vocal Album for Rockferry, as well as three Brit Awards.
Born Aimee Anne Duffy in Bangor, Wales, the singer released both of her albums through A&M in the UK. After her meteoric rise to fame, she spoke of the pressures of public life, telling the Western Mail in an interview that year she was “borderline on a nervous breakdown”.
“I used to make music when no one had heard of me and there was nothing else going on in my life,” she said according to Wales Online.
“As a girl I thought I was super-human but there are pressures about being public in what I do. All the doubts I have are of myself. Can I handle this? Do I want to disappear?”
Duffy went on to perform during an Edith Piaf tribute concert at New York City’s Beacon Theatre in September 2013 – one of her last public performances to date.