Pop Icon Madonna recently revealed in Harper’s Bazaar Magazine that she too
was a victim of rape. She describes how her rough
start in NYC motivated her and inspired her work, making her one of the most
recognizable names in the U.S.
She
described her younger years as being seen as “strange,” keeping her from making
many friends.
“But it all turned out
good in the end, because when you aren’t popular and you don’t have a social
life, it gives you more time to focus on your future.”
She
moved to New York City to make herself famous, but it wasn’t all
flashing lights and parties.
“My apartment (was)
broken into three times. I don’t know why; I had nothing of value after they
took my radio the first time,” the “Vogue” singer wrote. “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.”
On that roof she was
brutally raped. Though Madonna does not specify how old she was, the Michigan
native arrived in the Big Apple in 1978 — meaning she would be around 20 at the
time of the attack.
The budding star did not
report the sex assault to cops, Lucy O’Brien wrote in her 2007 biography,
“Madonna: Like an Icon.” Instead, she “internalized” the brutality that left
her “crying and shaking on the roof.” The incident became a crucial moment not
only personally, but also in Madonna’s artistic development.
“Her anger at the attack
came out afterward in a need for complete sexual control,” O’Brien said. “Sex
became a mask, a way of psychologically turning the tables on her attacker.”
The assault became a source
of endless motivation for the Material Girl. “She encountered her own worst possible
scenario, becoming a victim of male violence, and thereafter turned that
full-tilt into her work, reversing the equation at every opportunity,” O’Brien
wrote.
Throughout the essay
Madonna returns to a theme she’s certainly familiar with: Daring.
“If I can’t be daring in
my work or the way I live my life, then I don’t really see the point of being
on this planet,” she wrote.
At the age of 35 she
decided fearlessness meant something much different than it did when she was
25. “I needed to be more than a girl with gold teeth and gangster boyfriends,”
Madonna wrote. “More than a sexual provocateur imploring girls not to go for
second-best baby.”
Instead, she found
stimulation in Kaballah, “a mystical interpretation of the Old Testament.” The
controversy over her spiritual awakening baffled her. “Was I doing something
dangerous? It forced me to ask myself, Is trying to have a relationship with
God daring? Maybe it is,” she wrote.
Ten years later, she
would reinvent herself again, this time by moving to England and adopting two
children from Malawi.
Props to Madonna for sharing her story. I think the more celebrities come out about what they've been through the more they inspire the new generation to not be afraid and to do something good with what they've experienced. End the silence and RISE.
For more information
see:http://www.nydailynews.com/entertainment/gossip/madonna-raped-knifepoint-article-1.1476599
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