What happened to Duffy?
Everything was told directly by Duffy the February 25, 2020 with a post shared on his Instagram profile. In that one long confession the Welsh singer, who had enormous success thanks to the single “Mercy” in 2008, so much so that she was considered at the time as “the new Amy Winehouse” before moving away from the limelight, tried to explain her prolonged absence from the spotlight and said she had been “raped and drugged and held hostage for a few days” from an unidentified person. Now, six years after her return to the scene, Aimée Anne Duffy, known simply as Duffy, has decided to tell her story firsthand and the nightmare she experienced in a new documentary film that will be released on Disney+.
What happened to Duffy?
For years, Duffy’s disappearance from the public scene remained one of contemporary pop’s deepest mysteries, a sudden and never truly explained absence that left the trajectory of one of the most recognizable voices of his generation suspended. On February 25, 2020, however, the singer decided to break the long silence with a message published on social media, in which, with direct words and without any filter, she said that she had been “raped, drugged and held hostage for a few days”, without indicating either the time or place where the attack took place. “The truth is, and please believe me, I am safe and well now: I was raped, drugged and held captive for several days. Of course I survived“, the singer had written of the post – now no longer available on her account: “Healing took time. There’s no light way to put it. But I can tell you that in the last decadein the thousands and thousands of days in which I committed myself to wanting to feel the sun in my heart again, now the sun is shining.” Without specifying the times or places of what happened, Duffy had then explained that she decided to tell it after being contacted by a journalist and added: “It was kind and it was incredible to finally be able to talk. You may wonder why I didn’t choose to use my voice to express my pain. I didn’t want to show the world the sadness in my eyes. I asked myself: how can I sing with my heart if it is broken? And slowly he came back together.”
After telling the nightmare he lived and kept secret for years, Duffy later provided further details about the kidnapping on his website. In a passage of the writing, still available online, the singer narrated: “It was my birthday, I got drugged in a restaurantthen I was drugged for four weeks and taken to a foreign country. I don’t remember getting on the plane and recovered in the back of a traveling vehicle.” She continued: “I was taken to a hotel room and the attacker returned and raped me. I remember the pain and trying to stay conscious in the room after it happened. I stayed with him for another day, he didn’t look at me, I had to walk behind him, I was partially conscious and closed in on myself. He could have gotten rid of me.” Stressing that he didn’t know how he “found the strength to endure those days”, the poster had claimed that the attacker had made “veiled allusions to the desire to kill me”, before underlining that he decided to share his experience because “we live in a sick world”. And again: “I hope it can give you comfort to feel less alone and less ashamed if you feel alone. I’m no longer ashamed that something hurt me so deeply. I believe that if you speak from the heart, the hearts of others will respond. As dark as my story is, I speak from the heart, for my life and for the lives of others who have suffered the same.” Concluding her story by letting it be known that she managed to escape from that nightmare “fleeing“, without providing details on how she managed to free herself, adding that “don’t remember how she got home“, Duffy had then said that she was initially afraid to go to the police, but that she then told everything to a female officer after someone had threatened to “make her story public”. The singer had also made it known that she had been close to “taking her own life” after the incident and that she had spent “almost 10 years completely alone“. Finally declaring that she felt she could “leave that decade behind”, the singer also made it known that she hoped to release “a musical project one day“, adding: “I doubt very much that I will ever be the person that people once knew.”
What will the new docu-film tell?
The “honest and courageous story” of Duffy’s life and kidnapping, as written in a press presentation picked up by the international media, will be at the center of a new documentary produced by Disney+ and Hulu. The feature film, currently without title or release datepromises “unprecedented access” to the singer’s story and will for the first time bring together, in finished form, the tale of success, fall and survival. Announced last March 25, and directed by Gill Callan, the documentary will therefore trace Duffy’s life from his childhood in Wales to his rise to success, as well as his retreat from the public eye after the kidnapping. According to a press release, it will include interviews with family, friends and “close colleagues” in the music industry.
Sean Doyle, vice president of non-fiction content at Disney+, said: “Fifteen years ago, Duffy was one of the most famous singers in the world. His voice was instantly recognizable and powerful. And then she disappeared. This film will give Duffy the chance to tell his story in his own words. We set out to find meaningful stories led by women, in partnership with Northern Ireland Screen, and it’s a privilege that Duffy’s is the first we can help tell. But above all, I deeply admire Duffy for her honesty and courage in sharing her story.” Director Gill Callan added: “Duffy’s life was marked by success and fame, but also by painby resistance and an indomitable sense of self. I’m drawn to the tension between vulnerability and confidence in her story, and how a person can be deeply scarred by their experiences but still find a powerful, expressive voice that’s unmistakably their own.”
And the music?
Before everything stopped, Duffy had been one of the biggest revelations of the late 2000s: her debut album, “Rockferry” of 2008, had dominated the British charts and conquered the international public thanks to a sound that mixed soul, pop and retro suggestions, driven by the overwhelming success of “Mercy”, which quickly became a global hit, and accompanied by awards such as the Grammy Award and three Brit Awards, which had consecrated as one of the new reference voices of British pop. The second album, “Endlessly” of 2010, while not replicating the impact of her debut, marked the last stage of a career that seemed destined to develop further, before coming to an abrupt end in 2011, when the singer disappeared from the scene without explanation, canceling appearances and projects and leaving only questions behind.
The truth would arrive almost ten years later, together with two songs released in 2020 – “Something Beautiful” and “River in the Sky” – which sounded like fragile but necessary attempts to express themselves again, rather than real discographic returns, marked by an intimate and reflective tone, distant from the pop immediacy of their beginnings. Since then, however, silence has imposed itself again, so much so that his Instagram profile remains stuck on June 18, 2020, the day in which he shared “River in the sky”, as if that return too had remained suspended.
