Duffy Says She Was Drugged, Raped During Four-Week Abduction

Photo: Dave Kotinsky/Getty Images

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At the end of February, pop star Duffy revealed on social media that her absence from public life, after finding success with her 2008 hit “Mercy,” was at least in part due to a traumatic incident in which she was allegedly raped and held captive. In a new personal essay, the Welsh singer writes about being drugged and sexually assaulted over the course of four weeks by an unnamed male perpetrator. “What is also hard to explain is that, in hiding, in not talking, I was allowing the rape to become a companion,” explains Duffy. “Me and it living in my being, I no longer wanted to feel that intimacy with it, a decade of that intimacy has been destructive. I had to set myself free.”

“It was my birthday, I was drugged at a restaurant,” the singer writes. “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. 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.”