Content Warning: This article discusses sexual assault and rape. If you or someone you know is affected by the following story, you are not alone. To speak to someone, you can call Lifeline on 13 11 14, or 1800 RESPECT on 1800 737 732.
Duffy – best known for her 2008 hit ‘Mercy‘, – has released her first song since detailing a harrowing ordeal in which she was kidnapped, drugged, and raped over the course of a month. The incident caused the singer so much trauma that she retreated from the limelight for a decade.
Sharing ‘River In The Sky’ on Instagram, the 35-year-old wrote that the track was “for the better days to come”, with the emotional tune being “a deeply personal and emotive piano-driven song” that follows her journey in healing from trauma.
https://www.instagram.com/tv/CBklZTOH7hn/?utm_source=ig_embed
In April this year, the Welsh singer opened up about the horrific event in greater detail, explaining her reasons for shunning the spotlight for ten years following the assaults.
“It was my birthday, I was drugged at a restaurant, I was drugged then for four weeks and travelled to a foreign country,” the singer wrote in a post on her website. “I can’t remember getting on the plane and came around in the back of a travelling vehicle. I was put into a hotel room and the perpetrator returned and raped me.”
“I do not know how I had the strength to endure those days, I did feel the presence of something that would track me down as a missing person.”
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She then elaborated on how the ordeal affected her, saying:
“It has already stolen one-third of 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.” She added that she later believed that “recovering was almost impossible.”
Duffy continued, “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. 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,” she said at the time.
“I feel safe now.”
Check out ‘Warwick Avenue’ by Duffy:
