Warning: this article contains details experience of sexual assault.
Duffy this week shared details behind her horrific rape ordeal, which resulted in her cutting off her hair and moving house five times out of fear of her attacker.
In a lengthy 3,000-word essay, titled The 5th House, uploaded to her website on Sunday night, the singer said she was drugged on her birthday and submitted to four weeks of assault, having been flown to another country.
In the aftermath she withdrew from life and explained she didn’t tell her family or friends as she’d ‘become estranged from all’. At one stage, Duffy said her hair became so tangled she cut it off.
The 35-year-old wrote: ‘I would not see someone, a physical soul, for sometimes weeks and weeks and weeks at a time, remaining alone.
‘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.’
Explaining to readers why she decided to speak after keeping the horrendous experience to herself for so long, Duffy wrote how she’d ‘fled’, moving several times out of fear – and now she finally feels safe.
‘It took so long for me to speak because after I was raped and held captive, I fled,’ she detailed. ‘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 added: ‘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.’
Duffy revealed someone had threatened to reveal her story, which forced her to tell police about the ordeal.
She wrote of the times she’d opened up to authorities about the assault, which forced her to retreat from the spotlight and not release music: ‘Once someone threatened to “out” my story and I had to tell a female police officer what information the person held about me, and why the blackmail was so frightening.
‘The second incident was when three men tried to enter my house as intruders, I told the second female officer about the rape then also.
‘The identity of the rapist should be only handled by the police, and that is between me and them.’
Last month Duffy shared an Instagram message in which she told fans what had happened to her, explaining why she’d not been seen for a lengthy period.
After sharing a song with Jo Whiley to be played on BBC Radio 2, the Warwick Avenue singer said this week she ‘owes it to herself’ to release a body of work once again.
