LADY GAGA Inside the star’s secret pain
The truth about her ‘ love story’ with Bradley and the childhood trauma that still haunts her
Lady Gaga has opened up as never before on her private life, crippling illness and her struggle to cope with being raped at 19 in a major conversation with Oprah Winfrey. It’s been a tumultuous year for the ‘Born This Way’ singer after splitting from her fiancé Christian Carino in February, just before winning an Oscar and then fending off hysterical rumours of an affair with A Star is Born co-star Bradley Cooper, after their steamy performance of ‘Shallow’ at the ceremony. The speculation reached fever pitch when Cooper split with his girlfriend Irina Shayk in June.
But Gaga, 33, isn’t surprised that people were fooled – in fact that was the plan!
“I mean, we made a love story. For me, as a performer and as an actress, of course we wanted people to believe that we were in love,” the singer told Oprah in the interview for Elle’s December issue. “We wanted people to feel that love … we worked hard on it, we worked for days. We mapped the whole thing out – it was orchestrated as a performance.”
She added: “When we talked about it, we went, ‘Well, I guess we did a good job!’.”
While Gaga explained that the two were just acting, an entertainment source has told WHO the pair did indeed share a special bond.
“[Cooper] has a huge and overwhelming connection to Gaga,” he said. “But it’s premature to say whether it will become a real love story, but the chatter about their closeness was definitely a factor in the break-up of Bradley’s relationship.”
Shayk had been blindsided by her partner’s instant bond with his onscreen girlfriend, and their gushing comments about each other.
Gaga told Time magazine: “From the moment we met, I felt a kindred spirit in him.” Cooper concurred: “She knows everything about me – everything. There is not one thing she doesn’t know, and I believe the same for me.”
When Cooper, 44, announced his relationship was over, Gaga had just started dating audio engineer Dan Horton, but that relationship fizzled, and last month she described herself as a ‘single lady’.
In addition to her confessions about the showmance, the flamboyant star was brutally honest about the suffering she’s endured in spite of her success.
“When I won the Oscar for ‘Shallow,’ I looked at it, and a reporter asked me, ‘When you look at that Oscar, what do you see?’ And I said, ‘I see a lot of pain,’” she told Winfrey. “I was raped when I was 19 years old, repeatedly. I have been traumatised in a variety of ways by my career over the years from many different things, but I survived, and I’ve kept going.”
Years later, Gaga, who suffers from the chronic pain condition fibromyalgia, is still experiencing the aftermath of her assault on a mental and physical level.
“I have PTSD. I have chronic pain. Neuropathic pain trauma response is a weekly part of my life,” she said in the article. “I’m on medication; I have several doctors. This is how I survive.”
Gaga told Winfrey she regularly goes to behavioural therapy to help her manage her mental health. “I was a cutter for a long time, and the only way I was able to stop cutting and self-harming myself was to realise that what I was doing was trying to show people I was in pain instead of telling them and asking for help,” she admitted.
In sharing her story, Gaga hopes to inspire others. “That kid out there or even that adult out there who’s been through so much, I want them to know that they can keep going, and they can survive, and they can win their Oscar.”
“I was trying to show people I was in pain”
– Lady Gaga