In a December 10, 2015 TimesTalks panel discussion, 29-year-old singer and advocate, Lady Gaga, opened up about being raped as a teenager. “I didn’t think about it for seven years,” said Lady Gaga, “I didn’t know how to not blame myself or think it was my fault.”
Lady Gaga also recorded the vulnerable song “Til It Happens to You” for The Hunting Ground, a recently released documentary on campus rape. Her frank discussion of her experience adds another layer to this powerful statement for rape survivors.
“It’s something that really changed my life. It changed who I was completely. It changed my body, it changed my thoughts,” said Gaga. “When you go through a trauma like that, it doesn’t just have the immediate physical ramifications. For many people it has almost like trauma, where you re-experience it through the years after it. It can trigger patterns in your body of physical distress.”
The TimesTalk discussion wasn’t the first time Lady Gaga opened up about her experience. Last year, in a Howard Stern interview, Gaga told Stern she was raped at 19 by someone “20 years older.”
“I don’t want to be defined by it,” she told Stern, “I’ll be damned if somebody’s gonna say that every creatively intelligent thing I ever did is all boiled down to one d---head that did that to me.”
In the complete TimesTalk panel video, Gaga discusses the impact of a culture that doesn’t trust a survivor’s testimony, and encourages victims of stalking or harassment to file formal complaints with the police if someone is making them feel uncomfortable.
Watch the full panel discussion below:
