Duffy, the Welsh singer best known for her 2008 hit “Mercy,” revealed that she was “raped and drugged and held captive over some days” in an Instagram post that marked one of her first public statements in years.
The singer stated several times that she is now safe, and though she did not reveal any specific details about what had happened, she said she would would be “posting a spoken interview” in the coming weeks. Duffy also said that she told her entire story to a journalist this past summer. “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.”
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“You can only imagine the amount of times I thought about writing this,” Duffy said. “The way I would write it, how I would feel thereafter. 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.”
Later in the post, Duffy spoke about how her trauma had weighed on her, saying, “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. You wonder why I did not choose to use my voice to express my pain? I did not want to show the world the sadness in my eyes. I asked myself, how can I sing from the heart if it is broken? And slowly it unbroke.”
Duffy released her widely successful and Grammy-winning debut, Rockferry, in 2008, though her 2010 follow-up, Endlessly, failed to have a similar impact. In 2011, Duffy announced she would be taking a hiatus from music, and returned only in 2015 to release a handful of songs for the soundtrack to Tom Hardy’s 2015 movie Legend, in which she also appeared.
“Please respect this is a gentle move for me to make, for myself, and I do not want any intrusion to my family,” she wrote. “Please support me to make this a positive experience.”
