Madonna revealed on Friday in an editorial that she was raped on the roof of a building at knifepoint, an incident that happened shortly after she moved to New York. She just turned 20 at the time of the attack.
“New York wasn’t everything I thought it would be. It did not welcome me with open arms. The first year, I was held up at gunpoint. Raped on the roof of a building I was dragged up to with a knife in my back, and had my apartment broken into three times,” she says in an article published in Harper’s Bazaar. “I felt like a warrior plunging my way through the crowds to survive,” she added about her beginnings in New York. She also talked about how she discovered Kabbalah noting that “what the teacher was saying blew my mind,” and about studying the Koran, believing that it’s important to study all the holy books.
Pop star’s comment comes now almost two decades since Madonna has revealed for the first time the tragedy she has gone through. In 1995, in an interview to promote her book “Sex”, Madonna spoke to the British publication New Musical Express in London about the experience.
“In a way it was a real eye-opening experience. I’d only lived in New York for a year and I was very young, very trusting of people,” she said at the time, adding that it had made her “much more street smart and savvy.”
The story was revisited in 2007 by Lucy O’Brien, in the biographical book about Madonna’s life, titled “Like and Icon.” The book states that during the incident, Madonna was forced to perform oral sex.
Described many times as “one of the best pop artist of all time,” also called the “Queen of Pop,” Madonna is the best selling singer of the twentieth century, according to the Recording Industry Association of America, with over 300 million albums sold worldwide. In March 2008, she was included in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
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