London - Duffy has told how she was close to suicide as she shared details of a four-week ordeal in which she was drugged in her own home, raped and taken abroad.
The Welsh singer, 35, said she has spent "almost ten years completely alone" after an unnamed man drugged her at a restaurant on her birthday before holding her captive.
Duffy, whose full name is Aimee Anne Duffy, said she fought to stay conscious during the ordeal, which she has detailed on her website for the first time since breaking her silence on Instagram in February.
"It was my birthday, I was drugged at a restaurant, I was drugged then for four weeks and travelled to a foreign country," she wrote.
"I can’t remember getting on the plane and came round in the back of a travelling vehicle. I was put into a hotel room and the perpetrator returned and raped 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 I was stuck with him for another day, he didn’t look at me, I was to walk behind him, I was somewhat conscious and withdrawn.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."
She continued: "The perpetrator drugged me in my own home in the four weeks, I do not know if he raped me there during that time. I only remember coming round in the car in the foreign country and the escape that would happen by me fleeing in the days following that."
She said she did not know why she was not drugged abroad, leading her to think she was given a class-A drug that the man could not carry with him overseas. Duffy claimed her attacker made "veiled confessions of wanting to kill me" – and said she has no recollection of how she eventually managed to escape.
North Wales Police on Monday said officers have tried to contact Duffy to offer support, but have not yet received a response from her.
Duffy’s debut album Rockferry was the best-selling in the UK in 2008 and won her three Brit Awards and a Grammy. But the singer, best known for her hit Mercy, vanished from the public eye after releasing her second album Endlessly in 2010.
She said she told "no one, utterly no one" about her ordeal for fear she would be killed. But she confided in a female police officer after someone threatened to "out her" and again after three intruders broke into her home.
She recalled remaining alone for "weeks and weeks and weeks at a time", during which she burned her clothes and cut off all of her hair. The singer said she was at ‘high risk of suicide in the aftermath’ but was helped by seeking therapy.
Duffy said she had considered plans "to another country and maybe become a florist or something, so that I could put the past behind with a new life and not trouble anyone else with it, to carry it alone". But she added that she now feels safe after moving five times in the three years following the ordeal.
She described rape as "like living murder ... you are alive, but dead" – and said it took an "extremely long time, sometimes feeling never ending, to reclaim the shattered pieces of me". She wrote: "I can now leave this decade behind. Where the past belongs. Hopefully no more “what happened to Duffy?” questions. Now you know... and I am free."