Lady Gaga shares some unplanned secrets with us during an interview with radio and television personality, Howard Stern. She talks about the time she had been sexually assaulted by a producer.

On her way to fame, something horrifying happened to the “Queen of Pop” that no one really knew about. In an interview with Howard Stern Tuesday, 28 year-old singer, Lady Gaga, reveals that she had been sexually assaulted by a former music producer. According to recent sources, Jezebel and Mail Online, she was only 19 years old at the time and claims the man that had sexually assaulted her was 20 years her senior.

While Howard Stern and Lady Gaga were discussing music, the topic arose when she began explaining the story behind her song “Swine.” She states:

“The song is about rape. The song is about demoralization. The song is about rage and fury and passion, and I had a lot of pain that I wanted to release. I said to myself, I want to sing this song while I’m ripping hard on a drum kit, and then I want to get on a mechanical bull—which is probably one of the most demoralizing things that you can put a female on in her underwear—and I want this chick to throw up on me in front of the world so that I can tell them, you know what? You could never, ever degrade as much as I could degrade myself, and look how beautiful it is when I do.'”

Although she does not expose the producer who had sexually assaulted her, she continued to open up about what happened that day and revealed how the “horrific” event affected her self-esteem and caused a lot of inner pain:

I was a shell of my former self at one point. I was not myself. And it — to be fair, I was about 19. So, you know — I went to Catholic school and all this crazy stuff happened. I was going, ‘Oh, is this just the way adults are?’…I was very naive.

It happens every day. 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… I wasn’t even willing to admit that anything had even happened.

Gaga is correct that this terrible thing happens to a lot of women, children, and men often. It is a cruel thing for anyone to become a victim of this crime and can be damaging. It can be a “paralyzing,” experience, the singer admitted, and difficult to recover from. She states, “I think I would be so — I don’t know how I would react. I think it would terrify me. It would paralyze me. I saw him one time in a store and I was so paralyzed by fear… It took me a long time to feel strong about it.”

But after years of dealing with the emotional, mental and physical pain, the singer has not allowed this event to overcome her. She states:

“I don’t want to be defined by it. I’ll be damned if somebody’s going to say that every creatively intelligent thing I’ve ever done is all boiled down to one dickhead that did that to me.”

Lady Gaga is currently pursuing her dreams still as a singer, performer, and actress. She continues to share her music with the world and not allow her sexual assaulter to keep her down.