Lady Gaga revealed on The Howard Stern Show Tuesday that she was raped as a teen.

The singer, 28, made the revelation after host Howard Stern asked about the controversy surrounding her performance of "Swine" at SXSW in March. During the song, "vomit painter" Millie Brown spewed neon green liquid all over the pop star. "Everyone's just looking for something to bitch about," Gaga said with a sigh. "Just lighten up! It's art! My friend Millie—she lives in London—it's her art form. She doesn't eat food and vomit it up. She swallows gallons of paint, OK? She's a hardcore bitch. She swallows paint and then she regurgitates it on canvases in rainbows and color. It's bizarre to watch, and sometimes there's techno in the background, and sometimes someone's singing, and sometimes it's in silence."

"I wrote a song called 'Swine.' The song is about rape. The song is about demoralization. The song is about rage and fury and passion, and I had a lot of pain that I wanted to release. I said to myself, 'I want to sing this song while I'm ripping hard on a drum kit, and then I want to get on a mechanical bull'—which is probably one of the most demoralizing things that you can put a female on in her underwear—'and I want this chick to throw up on me in front of the world so that I can tell them, you know what? You could never, ever degrade as much as I could degrade myself, and look how beautiful it is when I do.'"

"You keep alluding to...were you raped by a record producer?" Stern asked.

"I don't...I don't want to..." Gaga replied. "Happy times! Let's talk about happy things!"