Lady Gaga Tearfully Recalls Being Dropped Off 'Pregnant On A Corner' By Music Producer Who Raped Her At 19
Speaking up. Lady Gaga said she experienced a "complete psychotic break" after being raped and impregnated as a teenager by a music producer whom she would not name.
The 35-year-old appeared on the five-part docuseries The Me You Can't See, which was co-created by Prince Harry and Oprah Winfrey, and recalled being abused by an older man when she was 19.
"And they didn’t stop, they didn’t stop asking me and I just froze and I just… I…I don’t even remember," Gaga tearfully said on the Apple TV+ show about mental health. "I understand this Me Too movement, I understand that some people feel really comfortable with this, and I do not."
The "Born This Way" singer claimed the producer had threatened to "burn" her music if she did not take off her clothes. Though she detailed the incident, she does not want to identify him. "I do not ever want to face that person again," Gaga, who was born Stefani Germanotta, said.
"For a couple years, I was not the same girl," she reflected on the harrowing experience.
Gaga recalled going to the hospital for pain she continued to feel afterward. "I realized that it was the same pain that I felt when the person who raped me dropped me off pregnant on a corner by my parents' house because I was vomiting and sick 'cause I'd been being abused," she said. "I was locked away in a studio for months."
Since then, Gaga is said to have post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and and fibromyalgia, which is a condition that causes pain. "The way that I feel when I feel pain is how I felt after I was raped," she said.
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She continued, "I've had so many MRIs and scans. They don't find nothing, but your body remembers. I couldn't feel anything. I disassociated. It's like your brain goes offline. You don't know why no one else is panicking, but you are in an ultra state of paranoia."
The healing process was a "slow rise," and she found she could be well and make progress for months before "getting triggered" again.
"It all started to slowly change," Gaga explained, as it took her two-and-a-half years to learn methods to get herself out of rough patches, which includes playing music, going to therapy and taking care of her body.
She first publicly said she was raped in 2014 when she told Howard Stern. One of the reasons she did not speak up sooner was because she did not want to be "defined" by what had happened to her, but said it inspired her 2013 song "Swine."
"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**khead that did that to me. I'm going to take responsibility for all my pain looking beautiful. I did that," Gaga had told Stern.
In the same interview, she recalled seeing the producer in a store, which caused her to become "paralyzed by fear." Gaga said at the time, "It wasn't until I was a little bit older that I went, 'Wow, that was really messed up.'"
