Pop megastar Lady Gaga has admitted she went through a “total psychotic break” after being left pregnant by her alleged rapist.
WARNING: The piece below contains references to sexual assault and self-harm.
She has appeared in Prince Harry‘s Apple TV+ series The Me You Can’t See, which launched on the platform on Friday and features celebrities discussing their mental health battles.
Gaga told the show she used to self-harm, and that when she was 19, a producer threatened to burn her music if she did not undress.
The 35-year-old said: “And they didn’t stop asking me, and then I just froze, and I just – I don’t even remember.”
Lady Gaga, real name Stefani Germanotta, said she cannot name her alleged attacker, adding: “I do not ever want to face that person again.”
She first publicly said she had been raped in 2014.
Gaga said that years later an incident left her in hospital for acute pain and numbness, and was surprised she was treated by a psychiatrist.
Gaga told the show she learned to cope with her unwanted emotions, but said the process took two-and-a-half years. Pic: Apple
“First I felt full-on pain, then I went numb,” she said. “And then I was sick for weeks and weeks and weeks and weeks after, and I realised that it was the same pain that I felt when the person who raped me dropped me off pregnant on a corner, at my parents’ house because I was vomiting and sick.
“Because I’d been abused. I was locked away in a studio for months.”
She added that trauma changes a person, and that she was not the same after being assaulted.
Gaga said: “I had a total psychotic break, and for a couple years, I was not the same girl. 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.”
Gaga said she felt like “there’s a black cloud that is following you wherever you go telling you that you are worthless and should die”.
Discussing her self-harm, Gaga said: “You know why it’s not good to cut? You know why it’s not good to throw yourself against the wall? You know why it’s not good to self-harm? Because it makes you feel worse. You think you’re going to feel better because you’re showing somebody, ‘look, I’m in pain’. It doesn’t help.
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“I always tell people, ‘tell somebody, don’t show somebody’.”
She said the improvement of her mental health was a “slow rise” and warned others that it was not a “straight line”.
She added: “Even if I have six brilliant months, all it takes is getting triggered once to feel bad. And when I say feel bad, I mean want to cut, think about dying, wondering if I’m ever gonna do it.”
Gaga also told the show she learned to cope with her unwanted emotions, but said the process took two-and-a-half years.
Asked what it was she was going during that time, she said: “I won an Oscar.”
She won an Academy Award in 2019 for best original song Shallow from the film A Star Is Born.
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