Duffy: Captivity Went On for 4 Weeks

Singer reveals more details of kidnapping, rape
By Evann Gastaldo,  Newser Staff
Posted Apr 6, 2020 4:48 AM CDT
Duffy Reveals More Details of Kidnapping
This Dec. 8, 2011 file photo shows Welsh singer Duffy at the European premiere of "Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows" in London.   (AP Photo/Joel Ryan, File)

Welsh singer Duffy published a long blog post Sunday revealing more details of the horrific kidnapping and rape she suffered. Duffy skyrocketed to success with her 2008 debut album, Rockferry, and, as E! notes, "she seemed poised for the kind of massive neo-soul career that Adele has enjoyed in her wake." But after 2010's Endlessly, she largely exited public life until last month, when she revealed the crime that had been committed against her. Though her blog post doesn't say exactly when it occurred, the word "decade" is mentioned several times. "In hiding, in not talking, I was allowing the rape to become a companion," she writes. "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." She concludes, "I can now leave this decade behind. Where the past belongs."

As for the rape itself, she says it was her birthday when she was drugged at a restaurant and taken to another 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." Eventually he took her home, she says, and kept her drugged in her home; the entire ordeal lasted four weeks, after which she moved around a lot for a while in fear of the perpetrator finding her. She says she initially did not make a police report because she feared the unnamed rapist would kill her, but ultimately, "I have told two female police officers, during different threatening incidents in the past decade, it is on record." One of those incidents involved someone blackmailing Duffy with a threat to "out" the rape story, and the other involved three male intruders trying to enter Duffy's home. Read the full post, which includes references to the coronavirus pandemic, here. (More Duffy stories.)

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