Lady Gaga has revealed she was raped as a teenager.
The 28-year-old singer, who is dating actor Taylor Kinney, admits she “went through some horrific things” when she was 19 and relied on “a lot of mental and physical therapy” to help her to heal.
When asked if she was raped by a music producer while discussing her song, ‘Swine,’ the singer initially told ‘The Howard Stern Show': “I don’t…I don’t want to… Happy times! Let’s talk about happy things!”
But when the radio host pressed her on the issue, she said: “I went through some horrific things that I’m able to laugh [at] 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?’…I was very naive.”
Asked if she’s ever confronted the guy, who was 20 years older than her, she said: “I think it would terrify me. It would paralyse me. I saw him one time in a store and I was so paralysed by fear. Because it wasn’t until I was a little bit older that I went, ‘Wow, that was really messed up.’ ”
The blonde beauty didn’t tell anybody about the incident at the time, but eventually decided to seek help.
She said: “I don’t know what I was thinking. 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.”