Lady Gaga has revealed that she was raped when she was a teenager.
During an interview with Howard Stern on Tuesday, the pop star divulged that she was assaulted when she was around 19 years old, and that the incident inspired one of her songs.
When Stern asked her about her provocative performance of her song "Swine" at SXSW earlier this year, in which she recruited "vomit artist" Millie Brown to expel green liquid on her, Gaga said that the act tied into the song's theme, which is about "rape" and "demoralization."
"The song is about rage and fury and passion, and I had a lot of pain that I wanted to release," the pop star said. "And 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 as much as I could degrade myself, and look how beautiful it is when I do.'"
Gaga also revealed that for a time she "wasn't even willing to admit that anything had happened," and was reluctant to go public about the assault because she "didn't want to be defined by it."
"I'll be damned if somebody's gonna say that every creatively intelligent thing that I ever did is all boiled down to one d--khead who did that to me," Gaga 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."
