Lady Gaga Tells Howard Stern She Was Raped at Age 19

Lady Gaga reveals that she was raped by a record producer when she was 19 (The Washington Post)

After some sensitive prodding from radio host Howard Stern, Lady Gaga, now 28, said on his show Tuesday that she had been raped by a record producer 20 years her senior when she was 19 years old. She was explaining the inspiration for her song, “Swine,” which she performed this year at the South By Southwest music festival with painter Millie Brown.

“The song is about rape,” Gaga said. “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 and 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 can never ever degrade me as much as I could degrade myself and look how beautiful it is when I do.’”