Via Instagram on February 25th, the international pop star made a shocking revelation. "The truth is, and please trust me I am ok and safe now," she writes in the caption for the only photo on her feed, "I was raped and drugged and held captive over some days. Of course I survived. 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 rose to prominence after her hugely successful debut album Rockferry, which peaked at No. 3 on the UK charts in 2008. The singer went dark, taking a step back from the spotlight in 2010 after releasing a less-successful followup album, called Endlessly. 

Her full statement reads:

 

View this post on Instagram

 

You can only imagine the amount of times I thought about writing this. The way I would write it, how I would feel thereafter. Well, not entirely sure why now is the right time, and what it is that feels exciting and liberating for me to talk. I cannot explain it. Many of you wonder what happened to me, where did I disappear to and why. A journalist contacted me, he found a way to reach me and I told him everything this past summer. He was kind and it felt so amazing to finally speak. The truth is, and please trust me I am ok and safe now, I was raped and drugged and held captive over some days. Of course I survived. 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. 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. In the following weeks I will be posting a spoken interview. If you have any questions I would like to answer them, in the spoken interview, if I can. I have a sacred love and sincere appreciation for your kindness over the years. You have been friends. I want to thank you for that x Duffy Please respect this is a gentle move for me to make, for myself, and I do not want any intrusion to my family. Please support me to make this a positive experience.

A post shared by @ duffy on Feb 25, 2020 at 10:12am PST

Harking back to artists like Dusty Springfield, Duffy was up there with her contemporaries Amy Winehouse and Adele, in what would become a soul revolution in the mainstream pop industry at the time of Rockferry's release. In 2013, she told Esquire: “I took a step back. I thought: I’m going to slow all this right down … It all got so complex, such responsibility. I was serenading people to sleep, not running Nasa. Suddenly I was a product, an enterprise, a businesswoman. But mostly I wanted to be human.”

In 2014, her producer said, "She went off the rails and it all went pear-shaped for her … But I always had quite a lot of sympathy for her, because she was young, from this tiny village in Wales, and she was just hurled into the fire.”

She does not specify where or when the attack happened, nor does she name an attacker.

• This story is ongoing.