Stefani Germanotta, the US singer better known as Lady Gaga, has revealed that she had a “total psychotic break” after a sexual assault at 19 left her pregnant.
The 35-year-old singer spoke on her experience with rape for the umpteenth time when she featured on ‘The Me You Can’t See’, an AppleTV+ docuseries, co-created by Prince Harry and Oprah Winfrey.
Gaga first talked about the incident during a chat with radio DJ Howard Stern in 2014.
A year later, she said: “I didn’t tell anyone for I think seven years. I didn’t know how to accept it. I didn’t know how to not blame myself or think it was my fault. It changed who I was completely. It changed my body, it changed thoughts.”
In January 2020, she also recounted how she developed post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) as a result of being raped and also not able to processes that trauma.
But in the latest docuseries, Gaga revealed that she was sexually assaulted by a music producer who threatened to burn her music if she didn’t take off her clothes at the time.
“I was 19 years old, and I was working in the business, and a producer said to me, ‘Take your clothes off,” she said.
“And I said no. And I left, and they told me they were going to burn all of my music. And they didn’t stop. They didn’t stop asking me, and I just froze and – I don’t even remember.”
The award-winning singer added that “the person who raped me dropped me off pregnant on a corner…because I was vomiting and sick”.
According to her, the experience culminated in years of trauma which left her in an “ultra state of paranoia”. She added that the trauma was still on when she won an Oscar in 2019.
“First I felt full-on pain, then I felt numb, and then I was sick for weeks after,” she narrated her experience at the hospital after the sexual assault.
“I realised that it was the same pain that I felt when the person who raped me dropped me off pregnant on a corner [by] my parent’s house because I was vomiting and sick. Because I had been abused, and I was locked away in a studio for months.
“I had a total psychotic break and for a couple of years, I was not the same girl. The way that I feel when I feel pain was how I felt after I was raped.
“I’ve had so many MRIs and scans where they don’t find nothing. But your body remembers.”
The singer, however, ruled out the possibility of mentioning the name of the alleged rapist.
“I understand this #MeToo movement, I understand that some people feel really comfortable with this, and I do not. I do not ever want to face that person again,” she said.
The music star added that after years of grappling with the experience, she had “learned all the ways to pull myself out of it. It all started to slowly change.”
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