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Singer Duffy has opened up about a four-week ordeal during which she was drugged in her own home, raped and taken to a foreign country.
The star has written a powerful account of the terrifying experience and the impact it has had on her life.
She had been out of the spotlight for a decade until she posted the first details on Instagram a month ago.
“In hiding, in not talking, I was allowing the rape to become a companion,” she wrote.
She has not named her attacker in her lengthy written account.
She wrote: “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. I was put into a hotel room and the perpetrator returned and raped me.”
She said she then “could have been disposed of by him”. She contemplated running away but was afraid her captor would call the police.
“I do not know how I had the strength to endure those days, I did feel the presence of something that helped me stay alive.”
She explained that she flew back to the UK with him but “knew my life was in immediate danger” because of veiled threats to kill her.
The singer wrote: “It didn’t feel safe to go to the police. I felt if anything went wrong, I would be dead, and he would have killed me. I could not risk being mishandled or it being all over the news during my danger.”
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Duffy – whose real name is Aimee Anne Duffy – is from Nefyn in Gwynedd
Afterwards, the singer was at high risk of suicide, she said, and became a recluse.
“I would not see someone, a physical soul, for sometimes weeks and weeks and weeks at a time, remaining alone. I would take off my pyjamas and throw them in the fire and put on another set. My hair would get so knotted from not brushing it, as I grieved, I cut it all off.”
She continued: “Rape is like living murder, you are alive, but dead. All I can say is it took an extremely long time, sometimes feeling never ending, to reclaim the shattered pieces of me.”
She said she considered changing her name and appearance and disappearing altogether to live in another country.
“I thought the public disclosure of my story would utterly destroy my life, emotionally, while hiding my story was destroying my life so much more. I believe that not singing is killing me,” she wrote.
“So, I just have to be strong and disclose it and face all my fears head on. I’ve come to realise I can’t erase myself, I live in my being, so I have to be completely honest and have faith in the outcome.”
She concludes: “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.”
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