Pop superstar Lady Gaga has revealed she was raped by a music producer when she was a teenager, E! News reports.

The "Applause" singer spoke about the incident when she guested on "The Howard Stern Show" Tuesday. Gaga spoke about the controversy that surrounded her performance of the song "Swine" in March and explained the inspiration behind it.

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

Gaga believed her performance of the song was her way of standing up to people who have degraded her or would want to degrade her in any way.

The pop superstar appeared to be alluding to a past experience of degradation and Stern openly asked if the singer was raped, Us says.

"Were you raped by a record producer?" Stern asked. "Was that what happened to you?"

Gaga did not answer directly and tried to veer away from the topic but Stern insisted.

"You know, I went through some horrific things," the songstress said. "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."

She then opened up about how she thought what happened was what adults typically do.

"To be fair, I was about 19...I went to Catholic school, and then all this crazy stuff happened," she said. "And I was going, 'Oh, is this just the way adults are?'"

She added, "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. I just had to get out of there."

The Grammy Award-winning singer said she wanted to sweep everything under the rug and not acknowledge it happened because she didn't want her life to be centered on the incident.

"It took me a long time to feel strong about it," she said. "I didn't tell anybody. And I didn't even tell myself for the longest time. And then I was like, you know what, all this drinking and all this nonsense, you have to go to the source. Otherwise it just won't go away. It will not go away."

Pop singer Kesha's lawyer Mark Geragos hinted that Gaga's abuser was Dr. Luke, whom they filed a case against for sexual assault, according to TMZ.

A representative for Gaga, however, said Geragos' claim was "absolutely not true."