Lady Gaga Says She Was Sexually Assaulted by a Producer

Lady Gaga claimed in a recent interview that she was sexually assaulted by a producer when she was 19.

Last year, Gaga sang “Swine” at South by Southwest, while covered in colored vomit. She told Howard Stern on his morning show Tuesday that the performance was meant to demonstrate that a man “could never, ever degrade me as much as I degrade myself.” The singer went on to say that she had been raped by an older man when she was a “very naive” teenager. The incident made her “a shell of [her] former self” and the true gravity didn’t hit her until years later. But she has since sought therapy.

Gaga has not publicly spoken about the assault before, and said Tuesday that she didn’t “want to be defined” by the incident. “I’ll be damned if somebody’s gonna say that every creatively intelligent thing that I ever did is all boiled down to one dickhead who did that to me,” she said.

Gaga declined to name the producer who allegedly assaulted her, but Kesha’s lawyer is claiming on Twitter that it was Dr. Luke and says he will depose Gaga in Kesha’s ongoing sexual-assault lawsuit against the producer. Gaga’s representatives call the assertion that Dr. Luke was her assailant “ridiculous” and “utterly incomprehensible.”

Listen to the whole interview clip here: