Recommendations of the Editorial team
After six years, Duffy is ready to share more about the harrowing experiences that caused her to completely disappear from the public eye more than 15 years ago. The singer-songwriter will be the subject of an upcoming documentary that looks at the aftermath of the assault and kidnapping she describes in 2011 and which she made public in 2020.
At France’s Series Mania festival, Angela Jain, head of content for EMEA at Disney+, called the documentary a “really powerful project.” Duffy caused a sensation in 2008 with her hit single “Mercy” from her debut album “Rockferry”. Another album, “Endlessly”, was released in 2010 – after that the singer became quiet.
“She disappeared off the face of the earth and never really commented on what happened during that time, except in a social media post about five, six years ago,” Jain said. This refers to a post that Duffy published on Instagram six years ago. “The truth is – and please believe me, I’m fine now, I’m safe – I was raped, drugged and held for several days,” she wrote at the time. “Of course I survived. Recovery took time. There’s no easy way to say it.”
Duffy’s long silence
At the time, she left many details of the alleged incident open, but announced that she would publish a “spoken interview” in the coming weeks – she had told the journalist her entire story the previous summer. The interview never appeared. This makes the documentary the first comprehensive account of what these years were really like for Duffy – beyond the detailed statement she published on the website DuffyWords in April 2020.
“It took me so long to speak because I fled after being raped and captured. I moved five times in the first three years after that because I never felt safe from the rapist – I was on the run for so long,” she wrote. “Eventually I found a place to live, the fifth house. It wasn’t as cramped as the others where I had mourned quietly – townhouses, apartments. In that place I spent years in solitude, finding the stability I needed to heal. I had stopped running and moving. I felt like he couldn’t find me in the fifth house. And I felt safe. I feel safe now.”
