'I was raped at knifepoint': Madonna tells, In ‘Harper’s Bazaar’ Cover Story

Madonna has revealed she was raped at knifepoint after arriving in New York as a 19-year-old dreaming of stardom. The attack took place on a Manhattan rooftop, the 55-year-old star told Harper’s Bazaar magazine.

She said: ‘New York wasn’t everything I thought it would be. 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.’
The music icon recalls how she coped after leaving her family home in Michigan in 1977 thanks to her dogged determination to succeed. 

‘I was defiant,’ she said.  ‘Hellbent on surviving. On making it. But it was hard and it was lonely, and I had to dare myself every day to keep going.

Her source of solace? A Frida Kahlo postcard, taped to a wall at her “shoe box” of a bedroom. “[T]he sight of her mustache consoled me,” Madonna says. “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.”

The rest of Madonna’s essay — she talks of her Like a Prayer years, discovering Kabbalah and motherhood — is, as they say, history.