For the first time, singer Duffy has opened up with details about a four-week ordeal during which she was drugged in her own home, raped, and taken to a foreign country.
The terrifying experience led to her retreating from the spotlight after releasing her second album in 2010. She wrote:
“Rape is like living murder, you are alive, but dead. All I can say is it took an extremely long time, sometimes feeling never ending, to reclaim the shattered pieces of me.”
Her lengthy written account, in which she does not name her assailant, comes a month after she shared the first details on Instagram, where she posted:
“It was my birthday, I was drugged at a restaurant, I was drugged then for four weeks and traveled to a foreign country. I can’t remember getting on the plane and came round in the back of a traveling vehicle. I was put into a hotel room and the perpetrator returned and raped me.”
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The star said she “could have been disposed of by him”. She considered running away but was afraid he would call the police. She said:
“I do not know how I had the strength to endure those days, I did feel the presence of something that helped me stay alive.”
She revealed that she flew back to the UK with him but “knew my life was in immediate danger” because he made veiled threats to kill her, adding:
“It didn’t feel safe to go to the police. 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.”
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The singer revealed that afterward she was at high risk of suicide, saying:
“I would not see someone, a physical soul, for sometimes weeks and weeks and weeks at a time, remaining alone. I would take off my pajamas and throw them in the fire and put on another set. My hair would get so knotted from not brushing it, as I grieved, I cut it all off. In hiding, in not talking, I was allowing the rape to become a companion.”
She said she considered changing her name and appearance and disappearing altogether to live in another country. She wrote:
“I thought the public disclosure of my story would utterly destroy my life, emotionally, while hiding my story was destroying my life so much more. I believe that not singing is killing me.
So, I just have to be strong and disclose it and face all my fears head on. I’ve come to realise I can’t erase myself, I live in my being, so I have to be completely honest and have faith in the outcome.”
Duffy, 35, said she has spent “almost 10 years completely alone,” but now feels she can “leave this decade behind.” The grammy winner eventually told a female police officer about the ordeal after someone threatened to go public with her story. She praised her psychologist for helping her through the trauma, concluding:
“I can now leave this decade behind. Where the past belongs. Hopefully no more ‘what happened to Duffy questions’, now you know….and I am free.”
Best wishes to you, Duffy.
