SINGER Duffy has revealed she was suicidal after her horrific rape ordeal and and thought she would never recover. The 35-year-old feared for her life when she was abducted as she celebrated her birthday at a restaurant and taken to a foreign country. She kept the “dark secret” from everyone for ten years, but has […]
SINGER Duffy has revealed she was suicidal after her horrific rape ordeal and and thought she would never recover.
The 35-year-old feared for her life when she was abducted as she celebrated her birthday at a restaurant and taken to a foreign country.
She kept the “dark secret” from everyone for ten years, but has today bravely spoken out about what happened to her.
Duffy published in detail about the devastating experience on her website duffywords.com, and explained: “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.
“I remember the pain and trying to stay conscious in the room after it happened. I was stuck with him for another day, he didn’t look at me, I was to walk behind him, I was somewhat conscious and withdrawn. I could have been disposed of by him.
“I contemplated running away to the neighbouring city or town, as he slept, but had no cash and I was afraid he would call the police on me, for running away, and maybe they would track me down as a missing person.
“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.
“I flew back with him, I stayed calm and as normal as someone could in a situation like that, and when I got home, I sat, dazed, like a zombie. I knew my life was in immediate danger, he made veiled confessions of wanting to kill me.
“With what little strength I had, my instinct was to then run, to run and find somewhere to live that he could not find.
“The perpetrator drugged me in my own home in the four weeks, I do not know if he raped me there during that time, I only remember coming round in the car in the foreign country and the escape that would happen by me fleeing in the days following that. I do not know why I was not drugged overseas; it leads me to think I was given a class A drug and he could not travel with it.”
Duffy disappeared from the showbiz spotlight after the ordeal. In February she released an emotional Instagram post saying she wanted to tell her story of being raped, drugged and held captive.
But it hasn’t been easy for Duffy to bravely waive her anonymity and speak the truth. She insists she wouldn’t be alive today if it weren’t for her therapist.
She said: “The first person I ever told was a psychologist, months later, a leading expert in the UK in complex trauma and sexual violence.
“I have no idea how I was so lucky to find her all those years ago, her beautiful blue eyes, pink sofa, huge library, amazing brain and skill. Without her I may not have made it through. I was high risk of suicide in the aftermath.
“She got to know me, saw me as a person, learned about me and navigated me. She did it very gently. I could not look her in the eyes for the first eight or so sessions, eye contact was something I struggled with. The thought of recovering was almost impossible.
Duffy says she is “no longer ashamed that something deeply hurt me”. 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.”
She said: “I posted the words I wrote, a few weeks ago, because I was tired of hiding. Never feeling free or burden free. I had become enmeshed with my story like a dark secret. It made me alone and feel alone.
“What is also hard to explain is that, in hiding, in not talking, I was allowing the rape to become a companion. 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. I have been hurt and it would have been dangerous to talk from that hurt place in the past, prior to feeling ready.”
She ended the lengthy post by telling fans she was now “free”.
Duffy added: “And I really don’t know what’s next for me. I would like to experience me being who I really am, for the first time, privately. To feel a peace that I have been, until now, only half feeling.
“I ask myself now, as I write this … what makes me feel more beautiful, more hopeful and more at peace? So, if I do indeed press SEND and put this online, I hope it brings me the smile in my eyes, the light in my life, that has been absent for just so long.
“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.”
