Duffy Makes First Appearance in 10 Years for ‘Mercy’ Remix After Revealing Harrowing Abduction Experience

• Singer Duffy appeared in a new TikTok promoting a remix of her hit song “Mercy”
• The appearance marks the first time the star has shown her face on social media since she revealed in 2020 she’d been raped, drugged and held captive
• Duffy lip-syncs along to “Mercy” and gives the camera a wink in the video

Duffy is back!

Five years after revealing her harrowing abduction experience, the Grammy-winning singer has popped up on TikTok to help promote an upcoming remix of her hit song “Mercy.”

In what appears to be her first public appearance in 10 years, Duffy, 40, lip-syncs along to a line from her 2008 breakthrough single before winking at the camera as the beat, remixed by e.motion, kicks in.

“Some of you asked if Duffy was really doing a UK Garage remix with us…” the caption, written by e.motion, read.

The group had previously posted its remix of “Mercy” on Instagram on March 21, and Duffy commented on the post, “Lets get it finished 👀.”

Last week, the duo confirmed that the Welsh star would be helping them out with a video that said, “Everyone is asking us if we’re going to release the Duffy remix… so we’ve decided to finish it with her in the studio.”

The post included a photo of a woman in the studio who appears to be Duffy, though her face is blurred.

The singer released her debut album Rockferry in 2008, and won the Grammy Award for best pop vocal album. Her second album, Endlessly, came in out 2010, though she left the public eye shortly after.

In February 2020, Duffy revealed the reason for her lengthy absence from the spotlight: a devastating ordeal some years earlier in which she was raped, drugged and held captive.

 “Many of you wonder what happened to me, where did I disappear to and why,” she wrote in a since-deleted Instagram post. “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 [but] 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 said she hadn’t spoken out publicly about the ordeal because she “did not want to show the world the sadness in my eyes,” but planned to share more details in the future.

Several months later, she revealed additional details in a powerful first-person account shared to her website. In her essay, she wrote that she was drugged at a restaurant on her birthday and taken to a foreign country, where she was drugged again for four weeks.

She said she was raped by her perpetrator in a hotel room, and that he made “veiled confessions of wanting to kill” her. The man then flew her back to the U.K., and proceeded to drug her in her own home for the next four weeks.

“Rape stripped me of my human rights, to experience a life with autonomy from fear,” she wrote. “It has already stolen one-third of my life. Deep down I do know it would have been a shame and done such an immense disservice to my existence to just delete myself and forget what I had experienced in music publicly.”

She said she’d become estranged “from all” as she hid in fear, but she was “no longer ashamed” about that chapter of her life.

“If you are reading this and are sad my encouragement to you is that … to know pain, you must first know how to love. Only the absence of love causes pain. So, go find it. Seek love in everything, even in a teacup,” she wrote.