‘Tired of hiding’ Singer Duffy pens detailed blog post about her kidnapping ordeal

(Warning: this story contains details of rape and abuse.)

"I had to set myself free."

Duffy has shared a lengthy blog post detailing her ordeal of being drugged and raped while held captive almost a decade ago. The 'Mercy' singer revealed earlier this year that she had disappeared from music due to the trauma of being kidnapped and drugged repeatedly over a four week period. She said that she had spoken to a journalist about what had happened to her, and that she wanted to continue to share more of her words to feel "liberated." In a new blog post, the singer that she shared her experience initially because she 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," she wrote. "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." Duffy said that she was drugged at a restaurant on her birthday before being taken abroad to a foreign country. She said she was then repeatedly drugged and raped in a hotel room, before being flown home with her alleged attacker. The singer said that she was then again drugged and held captive in her own home for one month. "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 wrote. "With what little strength I had, my instinct was to then run, to run and find somewhere to live that he could not find." Duffy said that after a period of time, a friend of hers saw her on her balcony, "yellow in colour and I was like a dead person." She said that sometime after the ordeal, she spoke to the police about what had happened. She added that somebody threatened to "out" her story, but that the identity of her attacker remains between her and the authorities. "In the aftermath I would not see someone, a physical soul, for sometimes weeks and weeks and weeks at a time, remaining alone," she said. "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. "I am sharing this because we are living in a hurting world and I am no longer ashamed that something deeply hurt me, anymore. "I believe that if you speak from the heart within you, the heart within others will answer. 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. "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." You can read Duffy's blog post in full here.