During an interview with Howard Stern on Tuesday, Lady Gaga revealed that she was the victim of a sexual assault when she was 19 years old.
While discussing her heavily controversial SXSW "Swine" performance where she had an artist vomit on her, Gaga said that there was much more to that whole thing than anybody realized.
"The song is about rape. The song is about demoralization," she said, explaining that in the performance, she took the power back by saying she could degrade herself more than anybody could degrade her.
Wow, that's some pretty heavy stuff.
When Howard pressed for details, asking if she had been raped by a record producer, Mother Monster avoided the question, but did say that she's been through "some horrific things" that required a lot of work for her to push through.
She also said that she was so traumatized by it that she wasn't even willing to admit that it had happened for a very long time.
Most importantly, though, she said she doesn't want to be defined by it. "I'll be damned if somebody's gonna say that every creatively intelligent thing that I ever did is all boiled down to one d**khead 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."
Darn right! We feel so awful to hear that this happened to her, but we admire her strength in sharing her story and love the empowering message she's sending through this interview. Go, Gaga!