[imagesource:wikimediacommons]

The lyrics for Duffy’s song ‘Mercy’ take on a vantablack tone when you hear her story about why she was suddenly out of the public eye after becoming so famous.

The singer rose to fame in the music scene in 2009, when she won the Grammy Award for Best Pop Vocal Album and was nominated for Best New Artist and Best Pop Vocal Performance. But then, one day, she dissapeared completely off the scene.

Over a decade later, in February 2020, Duffy explained her absence in a since-deleted Instagram post, sharing she had a harrowing kidnapping experience where she was raped repeatedly by her captor, per PEOPLE.

“Many of you wonder what happened to me, where did I disappear to and why,” she wrote. “The truth is, and please trust me I am ok and safe now, I was raped and drugged and held captive over some days.”

She said that the “recovery took time,” but after committing to healing over the course of a decade, she was ready to speak about her experience.

“I can tell you in the last decade, the thousands and thousands of days I committed to wanting to feel the sunshine in my heart again, the sun does now shine,” she wrote.

She needed more than mercy, she needed a miracle:

Real name Aimee Anne Duffy, the Welsh singer released her first album, Rockferry, in 2008 following the success of her lead single, ‘Mercy, which led to numerous accolades. On top of winning a Grammy, Duffy also won three Brit Awards, including Best British Album. The following year, she released Endlessly.

However, in February 2011, she announced she was going on a hiatus. She briefly returned in 2015 when she acted in the film Legend and created three songs for the soundtrack, but otherwise, she remained out of the public eye until 2020.

Two months after sharing her traumatic story on Instagram, Duffy gave more details in a heart-wrenching personal essay on her website.

She described the harrowing days that followed, her mind racing with escape plans while gripped by the chilling fear that her captor would evade the police, turning her into a missing person. Once back at her home, she endured a terrifying month under the fog of drugs, her very existence hanging by a thread as the threat was not over yet.

“I knew my life was in immediate danger, he made veiled confessions of wanting to kill me,” 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 did not name her accuser in her essay or her Instagram post and hasn’t spoken about their identity since.

“The identity of the rapist should be only handled by the police, and that is between me and them,” she wrote.

Initially, Duffy didn’t immediately turn to law enforcement, explaining that she “didn’t feel safe.”

“I felt if anything went wrong, I would be dead, and he would have killed me,” she wrote. “I could not risk being mishandled or it being all over the news during my danger. I really had to follow what instincts I had.”

Eventually, she confided in two female police officers following two frightening events. In the first, she faced blackmail, her tormentor threatening to expose her darkest secrets, forcing her to disclose the blackmailer’s leverage to the authorities. In the second, the terror escalated when three intruders attempted to breach the sanctuary of her home, compelling her to seek the protection of law enforcement.

After her traumatic experience, Duffy wrote in her essay that she wanted to distance herself from who she was — change her name, move to another country and change profession. She was forced to move five times in the span of a decade, isolating herself from her loved ones and everyone she worked with while she was a singer.

“The record label, live agents, promoters, publicists, musicians, stylists, hairdressers, make-up, lighting, production, crew, people I would meet, people I once knew. No one, utterly no one, knew what happened,” she wrote.

Duffy continued, “It kept me removed from those I could actually trust. Mostly I did not want to trouble anyone else with what I had experienced.”

After her February 2020 post, Duffy said she had planned to do a spoken interview, but realised that it was “harder than [she] thought.” Still, the following month, she wrote that she was ready to tell her story after a decade because she was “no longer ashamed.”

“I am sharing this because we are living in a hurting world and I am no longer ashamed that something deeply hurt me, anymore,” Duffy said. “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.”

She added that she was prepared to take her recovery public and return to the music world, seeing as it would be a waste to let her trauma take more of her life away.

“Rape stripped me of my human rights, to experience a life with autonomy from fear,” she wrote. “It has already stolen one-third of my 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.”

After sharing her story in 2020, Duffy retreated from the spotlight only to resurface again in March this year, when she posted a video sharing a message about the pursuit of happiness on Instagram.

Now, however, it appears as though her page has been stripped of any content besides this lonesome song:

 

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A post shared by Duffy (@duffy)

Wherever she is, we hope she’s safe and full of sound – as she said, it would be a shame if she is not.

[source:people]