Duffy recalls rape horror: Abducted on birthday, drugged for 4 weeks, taken abroad by man who wanted to kill her
Aimee Anne Duffy is opening up about harrowing details of being raped and held captive. The singer had opened up about the incident in February 2020. She revealed that's why she chose to step away from the spotlight as she wanted to deal with the incident that occurred with her.
She said that she finally wanted to come forward and talk about what had happened. In a candid piece, the singer revealed when the incident took place. “It was my birthday, I was drugged at a restaurant, I was drugged then for four weeks and traveled to a foreign country,” Duffy wrote. “I can’t remember getting on the plane and came round in the back of a traveling vehicle. I was put into a hotel room and the perpetrator returned and raped me.”
The star further revealed that she “could have been disposed of by him” while adding that “he made veiled confessions of wanting to kill” her. Even though she did have thoughts about running away, she decided to not take any action. “I do not know how I had the strength to endure those days,” she said.
She said he kept her there for four weeks and during this time, he drugged her. However, she wasn't sure if he raped her during this time. “I do not know if he raped me there during that time,” she wrote. Duffy further recalled that she was flown back to the UK by him and she was taken to her home too.
She continued, "Thereafter, it didn’t feel safe to go to the police. I felt if anything went wrong, I would be dead, and he would have killed me. 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. I have told two female police officers, during different threatening incidents in the past decade, it is on record.”
The singer also recalled how the incident had left her devastated and how she wished to “change my name off the public record and disappear to another country". Despite having these thoughts, Duffy knew that this was not how her story would end.
“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.”
Duffy confessed that the incident has also affected her relationship with her loved ones as she wrote, “The toll of me hiding, this last decade, also meant I was estranged from all. What happened was not only a betrayal to me, to my life, a violence that nearly killed me, it stole a lot from other people too. I was just not the same person for so long.”
She continued, “Rape is like living murder, you are alive, but dead. All I can say is it took an extremely long time, sometimes feeling never-ending, to reclaim the shattered pieces of me.” By sharing the incident, the singer confessed that she is no longer ashamed of her past.
“I am sharing this because we are living in a hurting world and I am no longer ashamed that something deeply hurt me, anymore,” she 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 also provided people with some words of encouragement as she told them that she knew the pain one goes through while in self-isolation. “Ostracization and isolation is known to be a form of torture. If anyone would have told me I would share my times of isolation, with a nation isolated, I would never have believed them. What I can share though, at this time, during this shared experience is the science. The brain’s ‘dorsal anterior cingulate cortex,’ which registers physical pain, is activated when we are isolated,” she wrote.
She ended the post by writing, "Knowing the mind’s science enables you to manage it. And isolation is a small price to pay for saving lives, therefore we must be strong in the face of it. This demands us all, as one, to act for each other; never has mindfulness been so vital as it is now, If you are reading this and are sad my encouragement to you is that … to know pain, you must first know how to love. Only the absence of love causes pain. So, go find it. Seek love in everything, even in a teacup.”