Madonna reveals she was raped at knifepoint

MADONNA has revealed that she was raped at knifepoint more than 30 years ago.

Madonna: knifepoint attack. Picture: AFP/Getty

The pop singer reveals her terrifying ordeal at the hands of a stranger after moving to New York from Michigan in an article for a magazine.

Writing in Harper’s Bazaar, the 55-year-old 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. I don’t know why; I had nothing of value after they took my radio the first time.”

Now a superstar and one of the world’s richest women, Madonna reveals she was a teenage loner who refused to shave her legs.

“Most people thought I was strange,” she wrote. “I didn’t have many friends; I might not have had any friends. But it all turned out good in the end, because when you aren’t popular and you don’t have a social life, it gives you more time to focus on your future.”

When Madonna, who had just turned 20 when she was attacked, said she found New York daunting. “Trying to be a professional dancer, paying my rent by posing nude for art classes, staring at people staring at me naked. Daring them to think of me as anything but a form they were trying to capture with their pencils and charcoal. I was defiant. Hell-bent on surviving. On making it.”

She he also writes about her conversion to the Kabbalah faith, writing “what the teacher was saying blew my mind”.

“I began to search for meaning and a real sense of purpose in life. I wanted to be a mother, but I realised that just because I was a freedom fighter didn’t mean I was qualified to raise a child.”