In October, amid the news that Kesha was suing Dr. Luke for sexual assault and battery, Lady Gaga hinted that she had a similar experience when she was a young artist. Today, on The Howard Stern Show, she opened up about the topic and said she had been raped when she was a teenager.
Stern and Gaga had been talking about the pop star's very controversial 2014 SXSW show. During her performance of "Swine," Gaga had artist and friend Millie Brown vomit on her while she rode a mechanical bull. While many argued Gaga was glamorizing eating disorders (a condition Gaga has wrestled with), she argued it was about degrading herself.
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"I wrote a song called 'Swine;' the song is about rape," Gaga explained during the interview with Stern. "The song is about demoralization. The song is about rage and fury and passion, and I had a lot of pain that I wanted to release." She explained she asked Brown to perform with her because she wanted to tell the world, "You could never ever degrade as much as I could degrade myself, and look how beautiful it is when I do."
Stern pushed her: "You keep alluding to...were you raped by a record producer?"
Gaga hesitated at first — asking that they talk about "happy things." While she's been pretty forthright over the years about her experiences with drug use and depression, she's been reluctant to talk about this experience.
"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. "I'm going to take responsibility for all my pain looking beautiful. All the things that I've made out of my strife, I did that."