What happened to Duffy? Abduction experience explored as Mercy singer makes first public appearance in 10 years

Aimée Anne Duffy recently made her first public appearance in almost a decade. The Welsh singer-actress was featured in a TikTok promoting e.motion's remix of her 2008 hit song, Mercy. Duffy cameos at the start of the clip, lip-syncing lyrics from her track before winking at the camera.

The caption of the TikTok post teases the collaboration by mentioning a release date,

“Some of you asked if Duffy was really doing a UK Garage remix with us…”

It was also the first brief appearance for the 40-year-old singer in five years since she revealed details about her kidnapping and assault. In February 2020, Duffy took to her Instagram handle to address the reason behind her sudden disappearance from the public eye. The Rockferry singer revealed in a currently-deleted post that she was drugged, kidnapped, and r*ped.

Aimée wrote,

“Many of you wonder what happened to me, where did I disappear to and why. The truth is, and please trust me I am ok and safe now, I was r*ped and drugged and held captive over some days. Of course I survived [but] the recovery took time.”

The singer said that it took her almost a decade to recover,

“There’s no light way to say it. But 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.”

The Warwick Avenue singer did not disclose any details initially but wrote about her experience in a blog two months later.

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Duffy spoke about her harrowing abduction and assault experience in April 2020

Two months after talking about her kidnapping, Aimée opened up about the tormenting experience in a blog post. Referring to the then-ongoing pandemic, Duffy wrote,

“I can only hope that my words serve as a momentary distraction or maybe even some comfort that one can come out of darkness.”

Before speaking about the incident, the singer wrote about the trauma and how everything impacted her life. Duffy mentioned that the incident “stripped me of my human rights” and stole “one-third of her life.”

She recounted her kidnapping and everything that transpired afterward. Duffy started by revealing that she was drugged at a restaurant on her birthday,

“It was my birthday, I was drugged at a restaurant, I was drugged then for four weeks and travelled to a foreign country. I can’t remember getting on the plane and came round in the back of a travelling vehicle.”

She continued,

“I was put into a hotel room and the perpetrator returned and r*ped me. I remember the pain and trying to stay conscious in the room after it happened. I was stuck with him for another day, he didn’t look at me, I was to walk behind him, I was somewhat conscious and withdrawn. I could have been disposed of by him.”

Duffy confessed that she did not know how she “had the strength to endure those days.” The singer revealed that she was drugged at her home for four weeks by the perpetrator.

Aimée also proclaimed that her life was “in immediate danger.” The perpetrator made “veiled confessions of wanting to kill” her while she was in captivity. She also mentioned being estranged from her family, adding,

“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. R*pe 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.”

Months after penning down her essay, Duffy criticized Netflix for streaming 365 Days. In a letter addressed to the streaming giant’s chairperson (then-CEO), Reed Hastings, she wrote,

“It grieves me that Netflix provides a platform for such 'cinema', that eroticises kidnapping and distorts s*xual violence and t**fficking as a 's*xy' movie.”

After her letter to Netflix, the singer-actress stepped away from the public eye.