Lady Gaga claims she was raped at 19. Photo: Ian West/PA Wire

Lady Gaga has said that she was raped as a teenager.

In an interview with Howard Stern the singer said that she was assaulted at the age of 19 by a man 20 years older than her.

She said: “I went through some horrific things. I’m able to laugh now because I’ve gone through a lot of mental and physical therapy and emotional therapy to heal over the years; my music has been wonderful for me.

“I was a shell of my former self at one point. I was not myself.

“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 naive.

“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 traumatised 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.

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

She said she has never confronted the man responsible: “I don’t know how I would react. I think it would terrify me. It would paralyse me. I saw him one time in a store and I was so paralysed by fear.”