Lady Gaga is opening up about a dark experience from her past. In a new interview with Howard Stern, the "G.U.Y." singer revealed for the first time that she was raped as a teenager, and how that experience helped her to be inspired to write her ARTPOP track "Swine."

First speaking about her controversial SXSW stunt, in which artist Millie Brown threw up neon green paint on her (upsetting Demi Lovato), Gaga opened up about her own traumatizing experiences in the past, including a rape when she was just out of high school.

"It happens every day, and it's really scary, and it's sad. It didn't affect me as much right after as it did about four or five years later. It hit me so hard. I was so traumatized by it that I was like, 'Just keep going.' Because I just had to get out of there," she said. "I wasn't even willing to admit that anything had even happened."

Gaga, who admitted that she's only seen her attacker once in a store since and was "paralyzed by fear," said she has thus far been quiet about her rape because she wanted to own her own narrative.

"I don't want to be defined by it. I'll be damned if somebody's gonna say that every creatively intelligent thing that I ever did is all boiled down to one d**khead who did that to me," Gaga said. "I'm going to take responsibility for all my pain looking beautiful. All the things that I've made out of my strife, I did that."

But now, she's feeling stronger than ever. "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."

She then once again emphasized that teaming up with Tony Bennett for Cheek to Cheek saved her soul.

Listen to the interview snippet below, via E! Online:

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