Lady Gaga opened up to Oprah Winfrey about the trauma of being raped as a teenager in the new Apple TV Plus series, “The Me You Can’t See.”
In the debut of the five-part series — for which Oprah Winfrey and Prince Harry serve as executive producers and share their own experiences — Gaga, now 35, tells Winfrey how she suffered a “total psychotic break” after an unnamed record producer raped her when she was a 19-year-old looking for a break in the music industry. Gaga said, “I was working in the business, and a producer said to me, ‘Take your clothes off.’ And I said no. I left, and they told me they were going to burn all of my music. And they didn’t stop. They didn’t stop asking me, and I just froze and I — I don’t even remember.”
Gaga, who has opened up about her sexual assault in the past, says, “I will NOT say his name. I understand this #MeToo movement, I understand that some people feel really comfortable with this, and I do not. I do not ever want to face that person ever again.
“This system is so abusive and dangerous,” she continues. “First, I felt full-on pain, then I went numb. I was sick for weeks and weeks and weeks and weeks after, and I realized that it was the same pain that I felt when the person who raped me dropped me off, pregnant, on a corner. [I was] at my parents’ house because I was vomiting and sick, because I’d been abused.
“For a couple of years, I was not the same girl,” she continues. “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 anything. But your body remembers.”
Gaga, who created the Born this Way Foundation in 2012 for young people struggling with mental health and wellness, admitted that she has been grappling with mental health since she was a child, and also spoke about cutting herself. “I used to scream and throw myself against a wall. You know why it’s not good to cut? You know why you shouldn’t throw yourself against a 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. It doesn’t help. I always tell people, ‘Tell somebody, don’t show somebody.’”
“I do believe that those urges, for me, came from a place of I need to show the hurt inside.”
She admits that the process of healing is slow. “Even if I have six brilliant months, all it takes is getting triggered once to feel bad.”
The “Me You Can’t See” is streaming on Apple TV Plus.
