Madonna Tells Howard Stern Why She Never Reported Rape: ‘It’s Too Much Humiliation’

The pop star revealed she was raped in a 2013 issue of Harper’s Bazaar

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Madonna may have just advanced understanding of why women often withhold reporting rape to authorities after they are attacked.

“I didn’t want to go back. You’ve already been violated,” the singer, 56, told Howard Stern in an interview on Wednesday. “It’s just not worth it. It’s too much humiliation.”

Madonna says she was raped in New York City when she was 19, and didn’t speak publicly about the incident until writing about it in a 2013 essay for Harper’s Bazaar.

“New York wasn’t everything I thought it would be. It did not welcome me with open arms,” she wrote. “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.”

While speaking to Stern, Madonna said her “stupid friendliness” allowed her to be convinced by a stranger to use a phone in his apartment after she asked him for payphone money.

“He was a friendly guy, and I’m talking on the phone and the phone was ringing, and I’m not sure why I’m telling this story,” Madonna said. “And he was like, ‘Well, I just live across the street. You can make a phone call from my house.’ I was like, ‘Oh, that’s really nice of you.’”

“I trusted everybody,” she concluded. “Anyway, the rest is not worth talking about.”

According to RAINN — the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network — 68 percent of sexual assaults are not reported to police, and there are about 293,000 victims of the crime a year.

Another scary statistic: 98 percent of rapists will never spend a day in jail or prison.

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