Lady Gaga reveals her teen rape

Lady Gaga has revealed that she was raped as a teenager.

The Applause singer spoke about her ordeal when she was 19-years-old during an interview with Howard Stern and said she relied on "a lot of mental and physical therapy" to help her to heal.

Stern asked if she was abused by a music producer while discussing her song, Swine, and she replied: "I don’t…I don’t want to… Happy times! Let’s talk about happy things!"

But when the radio host pressed her on the issue, she said: "I went through some horrific things that I’m able to laugh [at] now, because I’ve gone through a lot of mental and physical therapy and emotional therapy to heal over the years. My music’s been wonderful for me. But, you know, I was a shell of my former self at one point. I was not myself. To be fair, I was about 19. I went to Catholic school and then all this crazy stuff happened, and I was going, ‘Oh, is this just the way adults are?’…I was very naive."

He then asked her she ever confronted the older man and she said: "I think it would terrify me. It would paralyse me. I saw him one time in a store and I was so paralysed by fear. Because it wasn’t until I was a little bit older that I went, ‘Wow, that was really messed up.’ "

Gaga said she didn’t initially discuss the issue with anyone and eventually went to seek help.

She said: "I don’t know what I was thinking. I didn’t tell anybody. And I didn’t even tell myself for the longest time. And then I was like, ‘You know what? All this drinking and all this nonsense, you have to go to the source, otherwise it just won’t go away. It will not go away."