Lady Gaga revealed during an interview on the Howard Stern Show last Tuesday that she was sexually assaulted when she was just 19 years old, according to CeleBuzz.
During the interview, the topic had shifted to Lady Gaga's song, "Swine", and her performance at SXSW early this year where the singer rode a mechanical bull and had another woman vomit on her.
Howard Stern had repeatedly asked if she was raped. "I feel like you were raped by someone. I think that's what you're saying."
At first, the singer tried to move past the question, but finally answered. "The song is about rape. The song is about demoralization. The song is about rage and fury and passion. I had a lot of pain I wanted to release," Lady Gaga explained during the interview.
"I went through some horrific things. I'm able to laugh now because I've gone through a lot of, you know, mental and physical therapy and emotional therapy to heal over the years," she added.
Lady Gaga talked about the message of the song and why she performed it the way she did back at SXSW.
"'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."
The singer, who is currently dating actor Taylor Kinney, refused to name her assailant, but confirmed that he was at least 20 years older than she was at the time, reports USA Today.
"I was about 19," she said. "I went to Catholic school and then all this crazy stuff happened and I was going, 'Oh is this just the way adults are? I was naïve. It happens every day, and it's really scary, and it's sad. 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."
Howard Stern mentioned that women who were raped usually experienced a "delayed reaction".
"It almost doesn't register for a couple of years," Stern said, to which the singer answered, "I wasn't willing to admit that anything had happened. I didn't tell anybody. I didn't tell myself for the longest time."
Lady Gaga, however, indicated during the interview that she was moving on.
"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 dickhead who did that to me," she said.