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Madonna made headlines on Friday as she addressed a horrifying memory from her early days in New York City.
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The pop icon, in a guest essay for Harper’s Bazaar, openly addresses a time that she was raped at knifepoint on the roof of a building after moving from Rochester, Mich., to the Big Apple.
“New York wasn’t everything I thought it would be,” she writes. “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.” [Punctuation sic]
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The comments come nearly two decades after Madonna first revealed the frightening story. In a 1995 interview promoting her book Sex, Madonna told London’s New Musical Express about the experience.
“In a way it was a real eye-opening experience. I’d only lived in New York for a year and I was very young, very trusting of people,” she said at the time, acknowledging that it had made her “much more street smart and savvy.”
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The story was revisited once again in Lucy O’Brien‘s 2007 biography of the singer titled Like an Icon. The book states that during the incident, Madonna was forced to perform fellatio.
In Madonna’s Harper’s Bazaar essay, published online Friday, the singer explores her longtime desire to be a risk-taker and explains why she chose the title Truth or Dare for her 1991 documentary. (“It’s a fun game to play if you’re in the mood to take risks, and usually I am,” she says.)
Read more from Madonna’s column here, including commentary about being an “eccentric” young pop star, the firestorm of criticism surrounding her involvement in Kabbalah and how she continues to be “daring” today.
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