Duffy has revealed harrowing details of a four-week ordeal during which she says she was drugged at a restaurant on her birthday, taken to a foreign country and raped by an unnamed attacker.
In a post on her website, the singer said she was making the details public in order to free herself of her emotional burden and help others who “have suffered the same.”
Duffy said she escaped by “fleeing” but did not provide details of how she got away, adding she “cannot remember getting home.” She added that she eventually told a female police officer what happened, after someone threatened to go public with the story.
However, she said, “the identity of the rapist should be only handled by the police, and that is between me and them.”
The singer, who first revealed her trauma in an Instagram post in February, started by warning readers that they might find her account upsetting and advised those unable to “take on someone else’s suffering” not to read it.
“It was my birthday, I was drugged at a restaurant, I was drugged then for four weeks and travelled to a foreign country. I can’t remember getting on the plane and came round in the back of a travelling vehicle,” she wrote.
“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.”
Duffy went on to say that she does not know how she had “the strength to endure those days” and that the perpetrator made “veiled confessions of wanting to kill me.”
Duffy said she has spent “almost 10 years completely alone,” but now feels she can “leave this decade behind.” She concluded the online outpouring by saying she hoped sharing her story “brings me the smile in my eyes, the light in my life, that has been absent for just so long.”
“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.”
Duffy took home the Best Pop Vocal award at the 2009 Grammys for her breakthrough album, Rockferry. Her second album, Endlessly, was released in 2010 before she retreated from the spotlight.
