Madonna: I Was Raped At Knifepoint In NYC

Madonna opened up to Harper’s Bazaar about being raped at knifepoint in New York City after moving from Michigan to pursue a career in modern dance in the late 1970s.

Madonna dropped out of the University of Michigan, where she had a dance scholarship, in 1978 to move to the Big Apple. But the city turned out to be the opposite of what she expected.

“New York wasn’t everything I thought it would be,” the 55-year-old said. “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.”

The Material Girl also said that her apartment was broken into three times, even though she had “nothing of value” after her radio was stolen during the first robbery. And while she sometimes wondered if pursuing a dance career was worth it, she remained in New York, paying her rent by posing nude for art classes.

“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 said. “Sometimes I would play the victim and cry in my shoe box of a bedroom with a window that faced a wall, watching the pigeons s**t on my windowsill.”

Madonna said she found comfort in a picture of Frida Kahlo that she kept taped to her wall.

“The sight of her mustache consoled me,” she said. “Because she was an artist who didn’t care what people thought. I admired her. She was daring. People gave her a hard time. Life gave her a hard time. If she could do it, then so could I.”

Madonna previously wrote about her experience moving to New York in her controversial Sex coffee table book. She wrote that the experience turned her into a survivor, a point she reiterated in her Harper’s Bazaar essay.

“I felt like a warrior plunging my way through the crowds to survive,” she said. “Blood pumping through my veins, I was poised for survival. I felt alive.”

[Photo credit: Denis Beaumont / Shutterstock.com]