Welsh singer Duffy gives further details on her kidnapping, rape & recovery

****Trigger Warning

In February, the Welsh singer Duffy revealed why she had stepped away from music and everything else for the better part of a decade: she was the victim of a horrific crime. She was kidnapped and raped years ago, and it’s taken her a long time and years of therapy to speak about what happened publicly. Duffy told the brief story of what happened to her on her Instagram, and promised that when she was strong enough, she would tell the more complete story. I feel like she’s also easing us into what happened because even in 2020, even after Me Too, there will be some people who nitpick her story or question the details of her story. Duffy has now given us what she promised, a full account of what happened to her. You can read her account here. Here’s part of it:

Rape stripped me of my human rights, to experience a life with autonomy from fear. It has already stolen one third my of life. Deep down I do know it would have been a shame and done such an immense disservice to my existence to just delete myself and forget what I had experienced in music publicly.
…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 I was stuck with him for another day, he didn’t look at me, I was to walk behind him, I was somewhat conscious and withdrawn.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.
After it happened, someone I knew came to my house and saw me on my balcony staring into space, wrapped in a blanket. I cannot remember getting home. The person said I was yellow in colour and I was like a dead person. They were obviously frightened but did not want to interfere, they had never seen anything like it.
Thereafter, 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. I really had to follow what instincts I had. I have told two female police officers, during different threatening incidents in the past decade, it is on record.
And as I grieved what ‘I must have done to invite this into my life’, I read something that said, “in the end, it’s never between them and you, it’s always between them and God”. That helped me a lot in the absence of justice.

[From Duffy’s website]

I believe her, and I also believe she was drugged and moved around while she was kidnapped, and that the drugs and movement also explain why she can’t give a concrete timeline of when certain things happened, where and how she was moved and more. It’s horrific and it’s human trafficking and felony rape and kidnapping and all of that. Honestly, I could only get through part of her account. I want to support her but it’s such a difficult piece to read. She writes like someone who has done the work in therapy, someone who survived a huge trauma and is still making sense of it. This poor woman.