Lady Gaga has revealed that she wrote the song “Swine,” off 2013’s Artpop, as a way to express the rage and demoralization she felt after being sexually assaulted as a teenager. In an interview with Howard Stern on SiriusXM, the singer brought up the rape in the context of her performance of the song at South by Southwest. Although she declined to reveal the person who raped her at age 19, Gaga said that the man was 20 years her senior. The singer said, “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.”
