Singer Duffy Says She Was Raped, Held Captive

Pop singer has been out of the public eye for a decade
By Rob Quinn,  Newser Staff
Posted Feb 26, 2020 4:22 AM CST
Singer Duffy Says She Was Raped, Held Captive
In this Nov. 17, 2010 photo, British singer Duffy poses for photographs in London.   (AP Photo/Joel Ryan, File)

British pop singer Duffy has revealed the disturbing reason she has been out of the public eye for so long. The Welsh singer, who shot to fame with debut album Rockferry in 2008, says she was "raped and drugged and held captive over some days" and has been recovering from the experience, the BBC reports. "Of course I survived. The recovery took time. There’s no light way to say it," she said in an Instagram post. "But 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." She said she had told everything to a journalist who managed to track her down last summer. "He was kind and it felt so amazing to finally speak," she said.

"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," she said. "I asked myself, how can I sing from the heart if it is broken?" The 35-year-old did not disclose when the attack happened or the identity of her attacker, but said she would post a spoken interview in the weeks to come, the Guardian reports. "Please respect this is a gentle move for me to make, for myself, and I do not want any intrusion to my family," she said. Vulture reports that Duffy resurfaced very rarely in the decade after her second album, Endlessly, was released in 2010, though she contributed three songs to the soundtrack of 2015 crime thriller Legend, in which she played a supporting role. (More Duffy stories.)

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