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CNA Lifestyle

British singer Duffy opens up about rape, kidnapping ordeal in web post

The incident, which happened on her birthday, explains the singer’s absence from the public eye for so many years. 

British singer Duffy opens up about rape, kidnapping ordeal in web post

FILE PHOTO: British singer Duffy performs during a concert in Singapore Mar 22, 2009. REUTERS/Vivek Prakash/File Photo

Some years after shooting to fame with her single Mercy and best-selling debut album Rockferry in 2008, Welsh singer Duffy seemed to have simply disappeared from the limelight. 

The 35-year-old has now opened up about the ordeal that led to her staying away from the public eye, which she first mentioned in an Instagram post in February. 

She shared more about her horrifying experience in a post on her website on Monday (Apr 6), in which she revealed that she was drugged and raped on her birthday. 

“It was my birthday, I was drugged at a restaurant, I was drugged then for four weeks and travelled to a foreign country,” she wrote. “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.” 

She was afraid of the perpetrator, who she said threatened to kill her, and has not revealed the name of the person even now. 

She added that she managed to escape and went to to the police eventually. “I have told two female police officers, during different threatening incidents in the past decade, it is on record. The identity of the rapist should be only handled by the police, and that is between me and them.”

“Since the incident I experienced happened, it was upsetting to think of talking openly, frightening,” she wrote. “That’s why I, at times, would admit defeat and think I can’t ever talk and face it. So, I should just keep disappearing, turn the lights off in my life.” 

She also said that she felt that she couldn’t lie about her disappearance from the public eye, and that she had spent almost 10 years completely alone. 

Duffy shared that she was talking about her ordeal now as “we are living in a hurting world”. 

She added: “As dark as my story is, I do speak from my heart, for my life, and for the life of others, whom have suffered the same.”

The singer, whose real name is Aimee Duffy, first posted about the incident on her social media account earlier in February, although the post appears to have been taken down since then. 

In that now-deleted post, she wrote about her recovery: “The truth is, and please trust me I am ok and safe now, I was raped and drugged and held captive over some days. Of course I survived. The recovery took time. There’s no light way to say it. But I can tell you in the last decade, (after) the thousands and thousands of days I committed to wanting to feel the sunshine in my heart again, the sun does now shine.” 

Duffy released a second album in 2010 and did sporadic work as an actress, but generally kept a low profile in past years. 

Source: CNA/sr

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