Lady Gaga Opens Up About Being Raped As A Teen

Around this time last year Lady Gaga was a guest on the “Howard Stern Show,” where she revealed that she had been raped as a teen. On Thursday,  Gaga appeared at the TimeTalks session for the documentary on campus rape titled, “The Hunting Ground,” where she opened up about her own experience. “I didn’t tell anyone for, I think, seven years,” Gaga said.  “I didn’t know how to think about it. I didn’t know how to accept it. I didn’t know how not to blame myself, or think it was my fault. It was something that really changed my life. It changed who I was completely. It changed my body, it changed my thoughts.”

Gaga also opened up about the physical effects that sexual assault has on you. “When you go through a trauma like that, it doesn’t just have the immediate physical ramifications on you,” she said. “For many people it is almost like trauma. When you re-experience it throughout the years after it, it can trigger patterns in your body of physical distress, so a lot of people suffer from not only mental and emotional pain, but also physical pain of being abused, raped, or traumatized in some type of way.”

She even says that at one point she felt like she was responsible for her own rape. “Because of the way that I dress, and the way that I’m provocative as a person, I thought that I had brought it on myself in some way,” she said. “That it was my fault.”

“The Hunting Ground” is the same documentary where the alleged rape victim of Jameis Winston also appeared. 

Watch the panel discussion regarding the film below: