Duffy Opens Up About Sexual Assault and Kidnapping in Disney+ Documentary

Drugged at a restaurant on her birthday, held for four weeks, then transported to a foreign country — that is how Duffy described the ordeal that erased one of the biggest careers in British pop music. Welsh singer Duffy, who in 2020 revealed she had been drugged, raped and held hostage over several weeks, will share her story in a new Disney+ documentary, with EMEA content chief Angela Jain announcing the feature-length Hulu Original at Series Mania on Wednesday.

The documentary will be a retrospective film traversing Duffy's life, from her upbringing in Wales, through to her meteoric rise to fame and her withdrawal from public life following her unfathomable experience. The film will be driven by unprecedented access to Duffy, along with a rich and nostalgic archive, and interviews with family, friends and close peers in the music industry. It is executive produced by Fernando De Jesus for Rare TV, in partnership with executive producer Matthew Worthy for Stellify Media. It will be directed by Gill Callan from Northern Ireland.

In the late 2000s, Duffy was one of the biggest names in music, with her multi-platinum album Rockferry and its lead single "Mercy" hitting the top of the charts across the globe. Her hits earned her three Brit Awards and a Grammy, marking the peak of her career before she suddenly disappeared. Born Aimée Anne Duffy, she grew up between Gwynedd and Pembrokeshire before becoming an overnight sensation whose debut became the UK's best-selling album of 2008.

For ten years, Duffy vanished from the public eye. In 2020, in a harrowing Instagram post that shocked Britain, she shared that a decade earlier, she had been drugged, kidnapped, and taken to another country, where she was violently and sexually abused. After that initial revelation, Duffy shared further details in a 3,000-word post on her website. The perpetrator, whose name she did not reveal, "made veiled confessions of wanting to kill me." Duffy wrote: "I felt if anything went wrong, I would be dead, and he would have killed me." She eventually did tell the police, but said in the post that she had felt "petrified" ever since.

Jain told the Series Mania audience that Duffy had "disappeared off the face of the earth and hasn't really spoken about what happened in that time, other than about five or six years ago in a social media post," calling the feature-length doc a "really powerful project." She added: "She has entrusted us with her story, so we really have a huge responsibility to handle this with care and sensitivity, because she's speaking about what happened to her for the first time."

Director Gill Callan framed the film in terms of the tension at the heart of Duffy's public persona: "Documenting her life in this way for the first time, the documentary will be a retrospective film traversing Duffy's life, from her upbringing in Wales, through to her meteoric rise to fame and her withdrawal from public life following her unfathomable experience."

Sean Doyle, VP of unscripted for Europe, Middle East and Africa, said the film would give Duffy the chance to tell her story in her own words. "I am grateful to our collaborators at Rare TV for this unprecedented access, along with Stellify Media for handling this project with sensitivity and care. We set out in a search for impactful, female-led stories in collaboration with Northern Ireland Screen, and it's a privilege that Duffy's is the first we're able to help tell." "But above all, I'm especially in awe of Duffy — for her honesty and courage to share her story," he added.

Of a potential return to music, Duffy said in 2020: "I'm doing this to be freed, for all of me to be freed. What follows remains to be seen." No release date for the documentary has been announced.