*Duffy, the Welsh singer-songwriter who rose to global fame with her 2008 chart-topping hit “Mercy,” is stepping back into the spotlight on her own terms. The artist, who walked away from the music industry more than a decade ago, will be the subject of a new feature-length documentary set to stream on Disney+.
The project was unveiled this week at Series Mania by Angela Jain, Disney+’s head of content for EMEA, who called the film a “really powerful project,” per Variety. Jain noted that Duffy “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.”
Duffy first broke her silence in 2020 through a social media post, disclosing that she had been kidnapped and raped before withdrawing from music in 2011. She later published an extensive account online detailing the harrowing experience. “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, revealing that her abductor “made veiled confessions of wanting to kill me.”
She also addressed why reporting the crime immediately felt impossible. “It didn’t feel safe to go to the police. I felt if anything went wrong, I would be dead, and he would have killed me. I could not risk being mishandled or it being all over the news during my danger. I really had to follow what instincts I had.” Duffy ultimately did go to authorities, though she has since described living in a state of fear.
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Jain stressed the gravity of what Duffy is choosing to share. “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,” she said.
The film “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 press release reads. “The original documentary film will be driven by new, unprecedented access to Duffy, along with a rich and nostalgic archive, and interviews with family, friends, and close peers in the music industry.” Gill Callan is attached to direct, and cameras are expected to roll shortly.
Duffy summed up her motivation simply: “I’m doing this to be freed, for all of me to be freed. What follows remains to be seen.”
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