During her Tuesday morning interview with Howard Stern, Lady Gaga shocked fans by revealing that she was raped as a teenager. While she refuses to say that the traumatic incident shaped her as an artist, she admitted that the experience inspired one of her songs.

Lady Gaga made headlines earlier this year when she asked vomit artist” Millie Brown to throw up on her during her SXSW performance of her song “Swine.” Gaga explained to Stern that the theme of the song is about “rape” and “demoralization,” topics she apparently became familiarized with as a teen.

“The song is about rage and fury and passion, and I had a lot of pain that I wanted to release,” she said. “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.’”

Stern tried to get the singer to elaborate on her familiarity with the song’s theme, and even outright asked her if she was raped by a record producer. While she initially hesitated in answering, asking that they “talk about happy things,” she eventually gave in.

“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. 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 naïve. I was so traumatized by it that I was like, ‘Just keep going.’ Because I just had to get out of there.”

For several years, Gaga “wasn’t even willing to admit that anything had happened,” and didn’t want to go public about the assault because she didn’t want people to accredit her successful career as a songwriter to the tragedy.

“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. 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.”