British singer Duffy reveals details of rape ordeal

LONDON (ANN): British singer Duffy has shared more details about her rape ordeal after she disclosed on Instagram in late February that her long absence from music was due to a sexual assault.

Duffy, who received the Grammy Award for Best Pop Vocal Album for her debut album Rockferry in 2009, wrote on her website that she decided to tell her "dark story" to help "others (who) have suffered the same".

"It was my birthday, I was drugged at a restaurant, I was drugged then for four weeks and travelled to a foreign country," the 35-year-old singer, whose birth name is Aimee Anne Duffy, wrote.

"I was put into a hotel room and the perpetrator returned and raped me," she continued. "I do not know how I had the strength to endure those days, I did feel the presence of something that helped me stay alive."

She later flew back with her assailant and he "made veiled confessions of wanting to kill me".

Afterwards, she "would not see someone, a physical soul, for sometimes weeks and weeks and weeks at a time, remaining alone".

The singer of songs such as Mercy and Warwick Avenue thanked her psychologist who helped to pull her through after the ordeal.

She "had spent almost ten years completely alone and it still burns my heart to write".

Duffy said in late February that she had decided to break her silence over her trauma after giving an interview to an unnamed journalist last summer.

She wrote that she could now "leave this decade behind", but doubted "I will ever be the person people once knew". – The Straits Times/Asia News Network