More than a month after revealing in an Instagram post that she was drugged, raped and held captive for several days, Duffy has shared details of the ordeal.
“I posted the words I wrote, a few weeks ago, because I was tired of hiding,” the singer explained on her website. “Never feeling free or burden free. I had become enmeshed with my story like a dark secret. It made me alone and feel alone.
“I had to set myself free. I have been hurt and it would have been dangerous to talk from that hurt place in the past, prior to feeling ready.”
Duffy, best known for her 2008 hit “Mercy,” said at one point she considered changing her name, moving to another country and becoming “completely forever forgotten.” She feared that what happened to her would make it impossible to find love and she couldn’t imagine returning to music and having to constantly answer questions about her absence from the spotlight.
“I would have had to lie,”she said, “and I couldn’t lie.”
Duffy said she was warned not to tell her story because it could destroy her music career but, she added, “I take my personal freedom over any amount of stones that can be thrown at me. If I destroy my future, I do it to honour my past.”
(Warning: The description of what happened to Duffy may be disturbing to some readers.)
Duffy said it was her birthday, in June, almost 10 years ago. “I was drugged at a restaurant, I was drugged then for four weeks and travelled to a foreign country,” she wrote. “I can’t remember getting on the plane and came round in the back of a travelling vehicle. I was put into a hotel room and the perpetrator returned and raped me.
“I remember the pain and trying to stay conscious in the room after it happened. I was stuck with him for another day, he didn’t look at me, I was to walk behind him, I was somewhat conscious and withdrawn.”
Duffy said she suspects that she wasn’t drugged in the foreign country, which she did not name, because she might have been given “a class A drug and he could not travel with it.”
She detailed how she thought about escaping from the man and getting help. “I contemplated running away to the neighbouring city or town, as he slept, but had no cash and I was afraid he would call the police on me, for running away, and maybe they would track me down as a missing person.”
Duffy said the man, whom she did not identify, made veiled death threats. She flew back to London with him and said nothing to anyone. “It didn’t feel safe to go to the police,” wrote the singer. “I felt if anything went wrong, I would be dead, and he would have killed me. I could not risk being mishandled or it being all over the news during my danger. I really had to follow what instincts I had.”
Months later, she told a psychologist what happened. “Without her I may not have made it through,” she recalled. “I was high risk of suicide in the aftermath. She got to know me, saw me as a person, learned about me and navigated me. She did it very gently. I could not look her in the eyes for the first eight or so sessions, eye contact was something I struggled with. The thought of recovering was almost impossible.”
Duffy said she isolated herself for weeks at a time. She would take off her pyjamas and burn them and put on another set. Her hair became so knotted from not being washed that she cut it all off. She became cut off from her family. And she moved five times in three years.
“Rape is like living murder, you are alive, but dead,” wrote Duffy. “All I can say is it took an extremely long time, sometimes feeling never ending, to reclaim the shattered pieces of me.”
In the past decade, she has made law enforcement aware of what happened. Duffy said she told a female police officer when someone threatened to blackmail her and she told another female officer after three men tried to break-in to her home. “It is on record,” she wrote. “The identity of the rapist should be only handled by the police, and that is between me and them.” (Duffy did not say if her perpetrator has been charged.)
The 35-year-old Welsh singer, whose most recent album was her sophomore release Endlessly in 2010, said she hopes to make music again. "I owe it to myself to release a body of work someday, though I very much doubt I will ever be the person people once knew,” she admitted.
"My music will be measured on the merit of its quality and this story will be something I experienced and not something that describes me.”
Duffy concluded her lengthy online post with an expression of relief. “I can now leave this decade behind. Where the past belongs,” she wrote.
“Hopefully no more ‘what happened to Duffy questions,’ now you know … and I am free.”