American pop icon Lady Gaga shares the painful story of how a producer locked her up in a studio for months and raped her.
The 911 singer, now 35, detailed the abuse in Prince Harry and Oprah Winfrey’s Apple TV+ docuseries, The Me You Can’t See on Thursday. Gaga said, the producer “raped me and dropped me off pregnant on a corner by my parents’ house because I was vomiting and sick ’cause I’d been abused”. She added: “I was locked away in a studio for months.”
Gaga also said the producer threatened to “burn” her music if she didn’t take off her clothes.
Despite all the pain she suffered, Lady Gaga refused to reveal the identity of the producer who severely abused her. “I do not ever want to face that person again,” she said. Gaga recalled having a “total psychotic break” after the rape. “For a couple of years, I was not the same girl,” she said.
Lady Gaga first publicly told Howard Stern in a 2014 interview that a producer 20 years older than her had raped her; saying it inspired her 2013 track Swine. The music star said she didn’t tell anyone for years, fearing she might be “defined by it.”
“I’ll be damned if somebody’s going to say that every creatively intelligent thing that I ever did is all boiled down to one d—head that did that to me. I’m going to take responsibility for all my pain looking beautiful,” Gaga said, adding, “I did that.”
At the time, Gaga said she didn’t have any desire to identify or confront the producer. She said she once saw him at a store, causing her to feel “paralyzed by fear.”
Lady Gaga still suffers PTSD from the abuse
Years after, Gaga went to a hospital to seek treatment for physical pain. She said, “The recurring sensation of intense pain turning into numbness felt familiar. The way that I feel when I feel pain is how I felt after I was raped.”
In recent years, Gaga found out she suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD); which she says she developed as a result of the rape, and fibromyalgia, a condition that causes pain all over the body.
Gaga went on to describe the process of healing her mental health as a “slow rise”. Unfortunately, she could make steady progress for months before “getting triggered” and automatically feeling bad again. It took her 2½ years to learn methods — like therapy, taking care of her body, or playing music — that successfully pull herself out of the bad spells, the artist said.
“It all started to slowly change,” she added.
