After six years, Duffy is ready to share more about the harrowing experience that caused her to retreat from the public eye entirely more than 15 years ago. The singer-songwriter will be the subject of a forthcoming documentary that will confront the aftermath of the assault and kidnapping she alleges to have experienced in 2011, which she revealed in 2020.
At the French festival Series Mania, Disney+’s Head of Content for EMEA, Angela Jain, described the documentary film as a “really powerful project. Duffy released her hit single “Mercy” from her debut album Rockferry in 2008. While another album, Endlessly, arrived in 2010, the years that followed were largely absent of communication from the singer.
“[She] disappeared off the face of the earth and hasn’t really spoken about what happened in that time, other than about five or six years ago in a social media post,” Jain said. The post she’s referring to was shared six years ago on Instagram. “The truth is, and please trust me I am ok and safe now, I was raped and drugged and held captive over some days,” Duffy wrote. “Of course I survived. The recovery took time. There’s no light way to say it.”
At the time, she didn’t share many details of the alleged incident, but noted that she would be “posting a spoken interview” in the coming weeks, having told her entire story to a journalist the previous summer. The interview was never shared, making way for this documentary to be the first proper account of what these years have been like for Duffy beyond the extensive statement she published on the website DuffyWords in April 2020.
“It took so long for me to speak because after I was raped and held captive, I fled. I moved five times in the immediate three years after, never feeling safe from the rapist, I was on the run for so long,” she wrote. “I found somewhere to live, the 5th house, it was not as confined as the other houses, where I grieved silently, in townhouses or apartments. This place I would spend solitary years to find the stability to recover, I had stopped running and relocating. I felt he could not find me in the 5th house, I felt safe. I feel safe now.”
