In May 2021, Lady Gaga opened up about a traumatic and deeply painful experience. In an episode of Prince Harry and Oprah Winfrey's Apple TV+ docuseries The Me You Can't See, Lady Gaga, whose real name is Stefani Germanotta, says she was raped at the age of 19 by a music producer. As a result, she says she got pregnant and suffered a "total psychotic break."
It's a traumatic experience that has plagued her in many ways. During the interview, Gaga tearfully recounts the horror of her experience. “I was 19 years old, and I was working in the business, and a producer said to me, ‘Take your clothes off,’” she says. “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 — I don’t even remember.”
Lady Gaga is such a tremendous talent. She's respected as a musician and an actress, as well as being deeply authentic about who she is. Hearing someone of her stature so bravely open up about her story of abuse is nothing short of incredible.
The story Lady Gaga tells is a heartbreaking one. Still, she refuses to name the producer who abused her. Gaga explains that's because she doesn't “ever want to face that person again.”
She also says that during a visit with a psychiatrist, that pain was triggered. “First I felt full-on pain, then I went numb,” Lady Gaga says. “And then I was sick for weeks and weeks and weeks and weeks after, and I realized that it was the same pain that I felt when the person who raped me dropped me off pregnant on a corner.”
At this point, Gaga knows that the pain will likely stay with her forever in some way. “For a couple years, I was not the same girl,” she says. “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 star has previously opened up about the fact that she was assaulted. But this is by far the most we've heard her reveal. Back in 2014, she said in an interview that for a while, she felt she was to blame.
“I didn’t know how to even think about it, I didn’t know how to accept it, I didn’t know how to not blame myself or think it was my fault,” she said. “It was something that really changed my life. It changed who I was completely."
Hearing Gaga's painful story is powerful. It serves as a reminder that it's OK to talk about emotional trauma and that opening up about our experiences can be cathartic. It's just one of the many emotional interviews in the new series that aims to destigmatize talking about mental health issues.
For Gaga, while her pain is clearly still very present in her life, it doesn't own her. She's still become massively successful in spite of her trauma. She's been able to pull herself out of the darkness. As her story shows, though, she needed help to get through it.
