LADY Gaga has revealed she had a “total psychotic break” after being raped at 19 years old.
The singer, 35, opened up about the harrowing ordeal in the first episode of Oprah Winfrey and Prince Harry’s docuseries The Me You Can’t See.
Gaga said she was raped by an unnamed producer as a teenager and was diagnosed with PTSD years later.
She explained: “I was 19 years old, and I was working in the business, and a producer said to me, ‘Take your clothes off. And I said no.
“And 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.”
The singer, real name Stefani Germanotta, has spoken of the abuse before and said it left her suffering from post traumatic stress disorder.
She has never mentioned the producer’s name in a bid to avoid seeing him again.
Her traumatizing memories were triggered again years later in 2016 during a hospital visit.
She said: “First I felt full-on pain, then I went numb. 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 being abused. I was locked away in a studio for months.”
The singer went on: “I had a total psychotic break, and for a couple years, I was not the same girl.”
Gaga said she felt “ashamed” of her mental health struggles because she has “privilege, money and power”.
“I don’t tell this story for my own self-service, because, to be honest, it’s hard to tell,” she explained.
I feel a lot of shame about it. How do I explain to people that I have privilege, I’ve got money, I’ve got power, and I’m miserable?”
“How do you do that? I’m not here to tell my story to you because I want anybody to cry for me. I’m good. But open your heart up for somebody else. Because I’m telling you, I’ve been through it and people need help. So, that’s part of my healing, being able to talk to you.”
Gaga talked more about her psychotic break back in 2018, revealing she was “screaming in ER” at the height of her struggle.
“I was raped when I was 19-years-old, repeatedly. I have PTSD. I have chronic pain. Neuropathic pain trauma response is a weekly part of my life. I’m on medication; I have several doctors,” she told Elle magazine.
“I had a psychotic break at one point, and it was one of the worst things that’s ever happened to me. I was brought to the ER to urgent care and they brought in the doctor, a psychiatrist.”
“So I’m just screaming, and I said, ‘Could somebody bring me a real doctor?’ And I didn’t understand what was going on, because my whole body went numb; I fully dissociated. I was screaming, and then he calmed me down and gave me medication for when that happens—olanzapine.”
“It helped me that day, and that man [her psychiatrist] and all my friends, they saved my life.”
Gaga explained last summer that she’s on anti-psychotic medication because she “can’t always control what her brain does.”
The singer takes olanzapine, a drug primarily used to treat schizophrenia and bipolar.
Speaking to Zane Lowe on Apple Music’s Beats 1 radio station, Lady Gaga said: “I wrote a song on Chromatica called 911, and it’s about an anti-psychotic that I take and it’s because I can’t always control things that my brain does and I have to take medication to stop the process that occurs.”
“I know I have mental issues and I know that they can sometimes render me non-functional as a human.”
Earlier this year, Gaga was left horrified when her dogs were stolen and her dogwalker Ryan Fischer was shot four times in the chest.
He was then listed in critical condition but improved almost immediately as Gaga and her family pled with the gunmen to return her dogs and said Ryan didn’t deserve to get shot.
The dogs were eventually returned to a police station by a mystery woman who said she found the two stolen French bulldogs tied to a post days after the attack.
In late April, the two men who allegedly shot Ryan and the woman who “found” the dogs after they were kidnapped were arrested in connection to the crime.
