To say it’s brave of Lady Gaga to open up publicly about her rape is putting it mildly. Too often, women who are victims of assault are victim-blamed, told they are lying, or even told they were asking for it. By opening up on what happened to her,she is paving the way for other women who have gone through the same things. No one should have to go through seven years of trauma alone.
It’s been over a year since Lady Gaga revealed that she’d been raped at 19. At the time, the now 29-year-old pop star told Howard Stern that she didn’t want to be defined by the incident, saying “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 that did that to me.”
Now, Gaga is opening up about why she kept her sexual assault a secret, and how it changed her life. “I didn’t tell anyone for I think seven years. I didn’t know how to think about it,” she said during a TimesTalks panel conversation. “I didn’t know how to accept it. I didn’t know how to not blame myself or think it was my fault. It’s something that really changed my life. It changed who I was completely. It changed my body, it changed my thoughts.”