Culture February 25, 2020

Singer Duffy says she was 'raped and drugged and held captive'

WATCH: News headlines today: Dec. 23, 2020

Welsh singer/songwriter Duffy, best known her 2008 hit, "Mercy," largely disappeared from the spotlight for the past decade, and in a candid Instagram post Tuesday she explained why.

Duffy, whose full name is Aimee Anne Duffy, shared that she was "raped and drugged and held captive over some days," but is "ok and safe now."

She did not share when or where the alleged incidents took place, but said she'd be answering questions in a "spoken interview" in the coming weeks.

A representative for her label did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

"The recovery took time. 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," Duffy wrote. "You wonder why I did not choose to use my voice to express my pain? I did not want to show the world the sadness in my eyes. I asked myself, how can I sing from the heart if it is broken? And slowly it unbroke."

Duffy, 35, last released a studio album, "Endlessly," in 2010. She shared that she decided to go public with her story after finding it "amazing" to discuss it with a journalist who'd reached out.

"You can only imagine the amount of times I thought about writing this. The way I would write it, how I would feel thereafter," she shared. "Well, not entirely sure why now is the right time, and what it is that feels exciting and liberating for me to talk."