Lady Gaga has opened up about her traumatic experience of being raped.

In an interview for a TimesTalks Q&A for the campus rape documentary, The Hunting Ground, the 29-year-old songstress said the assault that happend when she was 19 was so frightening that didn’t tell anyone about being rape until seven years after it happened.

“I didn’t tell anyone for, I think, seven years,” said Gaga. “I didn’t know how to even think about it, I didn’t know how to accept it, I didn’t know how to not blame myself or think it was my fault. It’s something that really changed my life, it changed who I was completely. It changed my body, it changed my thoughts.”

Lady Gaga speaks frankly about her rape https://t.co/ECslE02O6Z pic.twitter.com/MAitnAK0E0

— Indy People (@TheIndyPeople) December 14, 2015

In addition to the immediate physical pain and lasting mental and emotional effects, Lady Gaga admitted that she has physically re-experienced the trauma through the years.

“It can trigger patterns in your body of physical distress,” she recalled.

As reported by The New York Post, one aspect of the trauma that lingered for years was her inability to let go of the guilt and self-blame.

Lady Gaga, @EmRata and @SelenaGomez love leather: https://t.co/NfFpzsktu8 pic.twitter.com/kotZN7uSdt

— W magazine (@wmag) December 14, 2015

“After it happened, I’m like, ‘But what did I do in my life to bring it upon myself?’ Maybe there was some sort of religious guilt attached to it, that I had somehow inspired the violence,” she said. “… For me, because of the way that I dress and the way that I’m provocative as a person, I thought I had brought it upon myself in some way, that it was my fault. I just never even told anyone.”

The documentary also features a powerful song about the subject by Lady Gaga.