Lady Gaga recently expanded on a shocking confession that rocked news headlines a year ago - that she was raped at the age of 19.
Sometimes, victims of rape do not only get blamed by other people - they also blame themselves. As with the case of Lady Gaga, who admitted last year in the news that she was raped at the age of 19.
Until recently, the "Bad Romance" singer hasn't opened up about the ordeal in any public interview.
On Thursday, however, Stefani Germanotta or "Lady Gaga" finally broke her silence over the horrible experience that "changed who she was completely."
"Because of the way that I dress and the way that I'm provocative as a person, I thought that I had brought it upon myself in some way," Lady Gaga said in a New York Times TimesTalk interview. "There was some sort of, maybe religious guilt attached to it that I had somehow inspired the violence,"
"I didn't know how to even think about it. I didn't know how to accept it," the singer added. "I didn't know how not to blame myself, or think it was my fault. It's something that really changed my life. It changed who I was completely even it changed my body, it changed my thoughts."
Lady Gaga, who was hailed Woman of the Year for Billboard's Women in Music 2015, gave an emotional performance of her song entitled "Til It Happens To You" at the said event. The song is a tribute to victims of sexual assault and is a part of the soundtrack for "The Hunting Ground," a documentary on sexual assault in college campuses.
"When you go through a trauma like that, it doesn't just have the...immediate physical ramifications on you," Lady Gaga said of the physical and emotional toll that rape causes to a victim. "For many people it has almost like trauma,"
"When you re-experience it throughout the years after it, it can trigger patterns in your body of physical distress, so a lot of people suffer from not just emotional and mental pain, but physical pain as a result of being abused, raped, or traumatized in some type of way," she explained.
Despite this, Lady Gaga refused to be defined by her horrible and traumatic experience.
"I don'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---head that did that to me," Lady Gaga told Howard Stern last year.
