Lady Gaga Reveals She Was Raped and Refuses to Let It Define Her

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Lady Gaga
appeared on The Howard Stern Show Tuesday morning, where she revealed that she was raped when she was 19.

The revelation surfaced while Stern and Gaga were discussing the controversy that arose at the SXSW music festival in March, when performance artist Millie Brown vomited neon green paint all over Gaga during her show, while she was singing her single "Swine."

Howard asked Gaga what she thought of the controversy, and Gaga explained the message behind the planned performance art incident.

"I wrote a song called 'Swine.' The song is about rape. The song is about demoralization. The song is about rage and fury and passion, and I had a lot of pain that I wanted to release," she explained.

Gaga continued, "I said to myself, 'I want to sing this song while I'm ripping hard on a drum kit, and then I want to get on a mechanical bull, which is probably one of the most demoralizing things that you can put a female on in her underwear, and I want this chick to throw up on me in front of the world so that I can tell them, 'You know what? You could never, ever degrade me as much as I could degrade myself,' and look how beautiful it is when I do,'"


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While Gaga only made passing references to past trauma, Stern pushed the issue, asking, "Were you raped by a record producer?"

After Gaga's initial hesitation to discuss the topic, the ARTPOP singer opened up to Stern, saying, "I went through some horrific things, and I'm able to laugh now, because I've gone through a lot of mental and physical therapy and emotional therapy to heal over the years. My music's been wonderful for me. But, you know, I was a shell of my former self at one point. I was not myself. To be fair, I was about 19. I went to Catholic school and then all this crazy stuff happened, and I was going, 'Oh, is this just the way adults are?'"

Gaga went on to reveal that the full effects of her trauma weren't felt until years later.

"It didn't affect me as much right after as it did about four or five years later. It hit me so hard. I was so traumatized by it that I was like, 'Just keep going.' Because I just had to get out of there," she said.

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Gaga also added that she wasn't willing to discuss the event in the past because she didn't want to let it define her or her music.

"I'll be damned if somebody's gonna say that every creatively intelligent thing that I ever did is all boiled down to one dickhead who did that to me," she said. "I'm going to take responsibility for all my pain looking beautiful. All the things that I've made out of my strife, I did that."

Hours after the interview, lawyer Mark Geragos - who is representing pop singer Kesha in her lawsuit against music producer Dr.Luke for alleged sexual and verbal abuse – tweeted a link to a story about Gaga's comments, along with, "Guess who the rapists was?"

Garagos later retweeted a Twitter user's question, "Are you insinuating someone that Kesha fans would know of?" To which he added, "#ohyes," and later tweeted, "#namethepervert."

When someone later guessed, "Lukasz," Geragos retweeted the guess, adding, "#bingo."

Representatives for Dr. Luke, born Lukasz Gottwald, have denied Geragos' accusations outright, releasing a statement to E! News, saying, "Luke met Lady Gaga twice for less than half an hour total in those two meetings combined. He has never been alone with her and never touched her. Neither meeting was in that time frame reported."

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Lady Gaga's publicist also denied Garagos' claims, saying, "This ridiculous, manufactured link between Lady Gaga and the Kesha-Dr. Luke lawsuit is utterly incomprehensible. This simply isn't true and how dare someone take advantage of such a sensitive matter."


Lady Gaga is no stranger
to revealing interviews. Check out the video below for a look at Gaga discussing her financial difficulties in a clip from the Epix documentary Who The F**K Is Arthur Fogel?

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