Lady Gaga came home to NYC last week so she could spend time with her family for Thanksgiving (I’m assuming). She’s been in NYC ever since – these are photos of her out and about yesterday, wearing a new wig and trying out a new “look.” I think Gaga’s default – when she can’t figure out something especially crazy – is to just wander around whatever city in her bra. Anyway, yesterday Gaga also made a stop by the Howard Stern Show and they ended up talking about some very personal issues. Personal like… Gaga said she was raped when she was a teenager. It started out when Stern asked her about her performance art work with Millie Brown (the paint-vomiter), which happened during Gaga’s performance of the song “Swine.” Here’s what Gaga said:
“I wrote a song called ‘Swine.’ The song is about rape. 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. I said to myself, ‘I want to sing this song while I’m ripping hard on a drum kit, and then I want to get on a mechanical bull’—which is probably one of the most demoralizing things that you can put a female on in her underwear—’and I want this chick to throw up on me in front of the world so that I can tell them, you know what? You could never, ever degrade as much as I could degrade myself, and look how beautiful it is when I do.'”
“You keep alluding to…were you raped by a record producer?” Stern asked.
“I don’t…I don’t want to…” Gaga replied. “Happy times! Let’s talk about happy things!…I went through some horrific things that I’m able to laugh [at] now, because I’ve gone through a lot of mental and physical therapy and emotional therapy to heal over the years. My music’s been wonderful for me. But, you know, I was a shell of my former self at one point. I was not myself. To be fair, I was about 19. I went to Catholic school and then all this crazy stuff happened, and I was going, ‘Oh, is this just the way adults are?’…I was very naïve.”
Unfortunately, the “Do What U Want” singer said, “It happens every day, and it’s really scary, and it’s sad. It didn’t affect me as much right after as it did about four or five years later. It hit me so hard. I was so traumatized by it that I was like, ‘Just keep going.’ Because I just had to get out of there.” In fact, Gaga told Stern and Robin Quivers that she “wasn’t even willing to admit that anything had even happened.”
Why was she so hesitant to address the assault?
“I don’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,” Gaga 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.”
Gaga said she never confronted the man, and if she were to run in to him again, she isn’t sure how she would react. I think it would terrify me. It would paralyze me. I saw him one time in a store and I was so paralyzed by fear,” she said. “Because it wasn’t until I was a little bit older that I went, ‘Wow, that was really messed up.'” Gaga said it’s especially hard since the man has told “people that we used to date!”
“You were 20 years older than me. I was a kid. How is that a date?” Gaga asked. “It took me a long time to feel strong about it.” Looking back, she said, “I don’t know what I was thinking. I didn’t tell anybody. And I didn’t even tell myself for the longest time. And then I was like, ‘You know what? All this drinking and all this nonsense, you have to go to the source, otherwise it just won’t go away. It will not go away.”
I’ll admit it, when I just read the headline, I thought… “I’m not so sure about this, Gaga.” I mean, she does and says a lot of stuff for attention, you know? And I’m not proud of the fact that those thoughts were my first reaction. But reading through her comments, I totally believe her. I think she was a relatively sheltered kid and she was probably in a situation where she was professionally, emotionally and sexually manipulated, and she didn’t understand what had happened until much later. It’s easy enough to call it rape when a person is being physically restrained and the victim clearly says “no.” People are less likely to understand when women talk about being manipulated into nonconsensual sexual situations, especially when it’s someone young who doesn’t have the language to express what happened.
Photos courtesy of Fame/Flynet.
And yet she hangs around with Terry f*cking Richardson and did a song with R Kelly…
(not trying to say she’s lying or to devalue her statement, I just…yeah)
Sigh…
Oh, excellent point. Maybe she hasn’t completed digested the parallels and her cognitive dissonance.
completely*
+1
Lindy is correct, showing public support for men who are known abusers and pedophiles is not a great way to assert your control of your life.
At this point she’s not in danger, but she is showing by association that they are supposedly good guys, which puts other young women in that same position.
I’m not attempting to excuse her choice of working with R. Kelly, but I wonder how much of that choice was perhaps driven by the psychological residue of this experience. Not drawing any conclusions here, but sometimes people who have been sexually abused choose to act out publicly in a sexual manner with the same types of people who abused them to begin with. If there’s any truth to this, I seriously doubt she would be conscious of this since it doesn’t appear that she’s done any therapy or really worked through this trauma much at all.
We Are All Made of Stars, I think you’re right. Recently there was a post here about Pamela Anderson and she said essentially the same thing. Lots of complicated psychological factors at play with Gaga.
Not just support but making friendships and promoting their work. Confirming their status as powerplayers (well TR in this case). She only cared about the RK backlash because it was bad PR + affected her music video/career. She doesn’t even care about the TR backlash for some strange reason. Maybe because he isn’t convicted and so many others are working with him too without any consequences.
Don’t forget that she also encouraged her fans ( a lot of underage “monsters” with emotional issues) to strip almost naked and post their pictures online to prove HER point about being confident (she isn’t). That was the straw that broke the camel for me. She’s such a fraud and a dangerous one at that.
Celebrities are like politicians. They crave fame like politicians crave power and they’ll rationalize anything to get it or keep it.
What was the last contact she had with him? The Oscars? I see less references to him now.
She just tweeted about R. Kelly the other day.
Exactly. Her connection with Richardson and R. Kelly are even more abhorrent given what she says happened to her. I am a skeptic as well and guessing that sooner or later, she’ll have been raped by Bill Cosby.
This. This right here…
It seems that she has since cut ties with creep face uncle Terry,…for the sake of it I’m giving her (somewhat) of the benefit of doubt as far as the extent of her knowledge of how horrible Richardson actually is. She’s constantly sheltered and focused so there is a possibility she just was sort of clueless about how horrible Terry is. Who knows though… the music industry is just so corrupt to it’s core.
Yep. And why now? I don’t have much faith in her. And that’s down to her. I’m not going to jump on board a pity story that’s not supposed to be a pity story. She is very manipulative.
I must admit too, I also gave the headline a side eye.
So did I unfortunately. I suppose in some ways the public is used to hearing and seeing Gaga do outlandish things, that when she does have something serious to say we don’t know how to react.
And it is a sad place to be in when everything you say is met with doubt.
+1
She’s like the boy who cried wolf :(.
All of Gaga’s interviews have been serious for a while. She has been exhausting with her victimization about her career and music, totally contradicting herself from other interviews, because she isn’t the darling she was. She whines, talks about her art, dissing other pop music as being lowbrow to hers, on and on. She’s been exhausting even to her fans when she contradicts over and over things she has said about her music before.
I’m not talking about the sexual attack. That’s different. I’m talking about other things to do with her career and herself that has turned many fans off with her incessant martyrdom over her career. So there’s plenty of serious Gaga interviews. I ignore most of what she says because she has exaggerated so much of it or is reacting to her perceived unfair attention to her latest album. She is thin-skinned when not praised as brilliant in music and criticized.
Again, I believe her on this subject of the attack and have always when she’s touched on it before
. But overall I have just found her exhausting in so many of her interviews because of her bitterness over Artpop not being praised and just the incessant whining and blaming everyone but herself for anything and everything to do with what has gone wrong with her album or promotion, etc., and how Tony has saved her, blah, blah. Then she backtracks on something she said. So she’s been plenty serious in most of her interviews for the last two years, just contradictory when comparing many statements she makes compared to another interview..
I dont know how I feel about this given the tongue lashing that those who had questions regarding Shias allegations got here. If nothing else it goes to show that male distress (rape, abuse) triggers more dissonance. Like omg a man got raped lets change the world. Oh a woman was raped? Whateva. Lets dig into her past, lets really interrogate the circumstances, pass the salt.
Yeah…I think I’m with you on this.
Not that I am questioning the validity of her claim, but once she denied having, or getting, plastic surgery and was sued by her former assistant, she lost whatever little credibility she had in my eyes.
I really don’t understand why celebrities have to deny what is so obvious to the naked eye…and old photos?
I strongly believe that if you are a celebrity who comes out years after the fact to say you have been raped, you need to name the perpetrator, because those in the public who may believe your story are going to guess who the perpetrator might be. Gaga’s story is completely unfair to those who were acquainted with her the time but are completely innocent.
Rape victims don’t owe you anything.
Thank you for saying this.
The entitlement in telling anyone how to deal with their trauma much less demand names…
Chile please.
I never said she owed ME anything. She owes people who may now be under suspicion something. That’s my opinion.
Exactly, captain hero.
No. She doesn’t have to name the perpetrator and if people want to speculate then that’s on the people speculating, not on the victim.
Say wha? Maybe it’s completely unfair to view rape as a lighthearted excuse to play a rousing round of Celebrity Whodunit at the expense of innocent people. She wasn’t even famous until she was around 25, so your point is moot anyway.
I don’t think that’s unreasonable. She could have continued to say nothing or talk about the rape and name names. How would you like it if a former acquaintance yours later became famous and said that an acquaintance she knew at the time did something horrible and people thought it may have been you?
This is true somewhat. There are already people saying it was Dr. Luke because of some tweet from Kesha’s camp, but Gaga’s people had to come out and deny that. Many fans think it is Rob Fusari and his name is always thrown around. In fact, it is probably a much lesser known person, but higher profile people will have their name thrown in. But it isn’t up to her to say if she doesn’t want to.
It was Rob Fusari. It’s pretty obvious, and if you listen to the full interview on youtube you hear her say something like ” if you know my career and know where I was at the time it’s not like you have to be a rocket scientist to figure it out.”
No, she should not name names unless she’s prepared to prove it was rape in the inevitable defamation lawsuit. Doing this would open the door for the guy to victimize her all over again, and she could end up paying him. If any unfair rumor about a friend of hers gets started, she can simply put it to rest by saying “it wasn’t him.”
Mixtape, Thank You!
I was raped multiple times by my stepfather throughout junior high, but my mother’s refusal to intercede framed my victimization so that by the time I dealt with it in my 30s, the statute of limitations had passed–I checked. My rapist would be able to sue me if I named him now. There has been no justice for me. They completely got away with it and have the legal protection now. It sucks.
She sounded sincere when I was listening yesterday.
I think her comments are a great riposte to all those trolls giving the women that Bill Cosby ‘allegedly’ raped such a hard time about why they didn’t report it at the time and how they are all clearly just gold diggers blah blah. She sounds terrifying genuine, especially the part about denying what happened even to herself; but then dealing with the fallout years later.
These women were terrified, ashamed, worried they wouldn’t be believed and that they had somehow done something wrong. Enough with the victim-shaming.
ITA.
Isn’t the stat that 1 in 5 women of experienced some form of rape or sexual assault? When you think about it like that… not surprising. I do think celebrities are more comfortable talking about it now though…especially when they see stories like Cosby and someone getting away with their crimes for so long and potentially doing it a lot.
ugh i just identified with her statements more than i have with anyone who has ever spoken about rape. i was raped when i was 14 and i have barely told anyone about it. as i grew older, i just shoved it down and said “this will not define who i am” but i had not dealt with it and the issues it caused for me resurfaced years later. it is still a secret that 98% of the people in my life, but i’ve at least dealt with it so i can move forward. i still refuse to allow it to define who i am in this world.
@jerjer i am so sorry that happened to you and at 14! Good on you for living your life as you want it. ((((((Hugs))))))
I believe her just because of how she chose to phrase herself and the way she spoke about it. I dont think she went in there intending to talk about it but then she did and she seemed to control it by talking about it in terms of how she processed the experience. If she was making it up she would have been looking for pity and probably would have played the victim angle, and that’s not what she was doing at all.
What I dont get is how she finds beauty in degrading herself more than her rapist did. For me, thats very backward. But whatever works for you I guess.
I think she hit the nail on the head when she said she didnt want to be defined by the experience though. Seeking help or telling people about what happened tends to get people branded a hysterical victim who can’t cope with reality.
Is it even possible to get over something like that? What does getting over it mean? How do you become aware of how the trauma is manifesting in other area of your life?
I agree completely with you assessment of this interview. I would add that choosing to degrade herself is, in a way, like taking back the power to do so from whoever hurt her. It’s also a bit like a dare, “you want to see me degraded? I’ll SHOW you degraded” kind of thing. Turning it into something over the top and clownish (gyrating! Rainbow paint vomit!) takes away some of its power, and makes a mockery of the desire to see someone degraded. Although who knows if she thinks of it as clownish, she keeps using the word beautiful to describe it.
Thank you for clarifying that for me! Not the route I’d go but at least I understand it a bit now!
She’ alluded to it in a lot of her videos already and referenced it somewhat here and there in interviews but this is the most she talked about it. But continued affiliation with men who are sexual abusers and one with underage girls is even more disgusting. We can believe her but she refuses to believe they are predators because they are in her inner circle, and she flaunts it. Terry is her buddy, and so he doesn’t move on her or his star friends, she refuses to believe his accusers. There is an arrogance about that to me. Using R. Kelly and Terry Richardson (he directed it) for the Do What U Want to My Body and being really bitter her label wouldn’t let her air it shows such a lack of insight to me.
She has said she was used by many powerful men in the industry as she was climbing her way up and it affected her to the point she began a long lesbian relationship. I don’t know if Gaga has been in therapy recently, but I hope she is to deal with things that have happened to her. She said recently in an article she is “mostly” sober. She is still getting high. She keeps alluding in interviews to all this depression she had over the past two years and is on medication. I think that will always be her struggle. I hope her boyfriend doesn’t eff her over. She will be a mess if that falls apart as he has given her a lot of stability and happiness.
edit: wrong thread.
Good post.
LOL
She’s talked about being sexually abused in the past since the beginning of her career so I really don’t see her as doing this for attention. She’s given small details in past interviews and even in her songs and videos but this is the first time I’ve heard her say she was actually raped. I believe her 🙁
I agree. She has hinted at it in the past, usually saying things about “dark” things she has experienced. I believe her as well.
I don’t think that bit about not saying anything “so it doesn’t define her” is the best thing to say… I mean, she IS a role model. It is hard enough for people to come forward, specially younger kids. Don’t say if you tell somebody about it everybody will think you’re just a raped kid and nothing you’ll do will be worth it, or that people won’t care about it. It isn’t true, and it’s not helping either.
you should never be forced or expected to be a role model for a cause just because you are affected by it, especially in the case of sexual assault. i praise the people who can come forward and become role models for survivors of sexual assault but you cannot expect that all of us are capable or willing to do that.
I agree with the other posters, saying it is gross for her to be collaborating with R Kelly and Terry Richardson. And I admit I feel bad about scoffing at the story when I first saw the headline, like many of us here. After reading the interview, and recalling that she has acknowledged her history to some degree in the past, I really do believe her. Having experienced it myself (albeit I was able to recognize what was going down before things could get out of control and was able to get the hell away), I know how easy it is for women to be coerced in the film and music industries, and how slimy these men are at achieving it. I was a smart girl, yet in the midst of it I couldn’t help but sit back and marvel at how cunning they were at tearing you down – one minute they’re meeting you for a “business lunch” to discuss a seemingly honest and legitimate opportunity for career advancement, and the next they are making catty remarks on your appearance and telling you everything that’s wrong with you – “You’re nothing special. I doubt you could make it on your own. Have you considered losing weight?” Telling you things that are even worse, that I don’t want to get into here. And then constantly calling you when you turn them down, trying to get you to meet up with them at their apartment. Inviting you to lavish parties. They really are predatory, and they have all of Hollywood backing them. If I didn’t have the grounded upbringing, and strong family support that I did, I very well could have been the one to fall for it. These men that pull these moves, trying to manipulate and take advantage of these young women, are absolutely repugnant. I swear to god if I ever get in a position to make a difference in this realm, I would put every single one of these bastards on display for public scorning. The worst part is that it is so rampant in film and music, that I have no doubt just about every single female celebrity has experienced it to some degree. I wasn’t even raped and I still felt so disgusting, dirty and ashamed for being foolish enough to meet with them in the first place. Poor Gaga. Poor ladies who get pulled into this.
As I mentioned earlier, I was skeptical when I first read the headline! Even having glimpsed it myself! Isn’t that awful? So I could see how anyone who was full on assaulted would be hesitant to talk about it, especially Gaga, who has unfortunately made more of a name for herself from her stunts and attention-grabbing gimmicks – probably because she has had her self esteem so brutally diminished from the industry that she truly believes she can’t be anything more than just herself.
So odds are Gaga is speaking the truth. I just wish she would be strong enough to stop working with these “swines” and helping them with their careers. She has the talent and charisma to make a name for herself without them.
Sexual assault is unfortunately far more common than people think it is, so I actually don’t doubt that she’s being honest about what happened. It is, however, a little off-putting that she would go through such an experience and then associate with men infamous for sexual abuse.