Madonna says she was raped at knifepoint in NYC

Published April 06, 2016

May 19, 2013: In this file photo, Madonna accepts the award for top touring artist at the Billboard Music Awards in Las Vegas. (THE ASSOCIATED PRES2013)

Madonna dropped out of the University of Michigan in 1978 to pursue her dreams of being an artist in New York. What greeted her was a city that was harsher than she could have imagined.

“New York wasn’t everything I thought it would be,” the pop icon wrote in an essay in the current issue of Harper’s Bazaar. “It did not welcome me with open arms. 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, and had my apartment broken into three times. I don’t know why; I had nothing of value after they took my radio the first time.”

The pop-icon-in-the-making found her new home to be exhilarating, but also the sort of place her childhood in the suburbs of Detroit hadn’t prepared her for.

“But I was also scared sh–less and freaked out by the smell of p— and vomit everywhere, especially in the entryway of my third-floor walk-up,” she wrote.

She never gave up on trying to become a professional dancer, doing what it did to chase her dreams, including working as a nude model for art classes to pay her rent.

“I was defiant. Hell-bent on surviving. On making it. But it was hard and it was lonely, and I had to dare myself every day to keep going,” she wrote.

URL

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