Lady Gaga Opens Up About Being Sexually Assaulted

— -- Last year Lady Gaga revealed that she'd been sexually assaulted at 19. Now she's opening up about the ordeal and explaining why she didn't tell anybody about what happened for seven years.

"Because of the way that I dress and the way that I'm provocative as a person, I thought that I had brought it upon myself in some way," she said during a New York Times TimesTalk on Thursday. "There was some sort of, maybe religious guilt attached to it that I had somehow inspired the violence."

Gaga, 29, sang the song "Til It Happens to You" for "The Hunting Ground," a documentary about sexual assault on college campuses. She told TimesTalk that the person who attacked her was someone she trusted.

"I didn't know how to even think about it. I didn't know how to accept it," she said. "I didn't know how not to blame myself, or think it was my fault. It's something that really changed my life. It changed who I was completely even it changed my body, it changed my thoughts."

"When you go through a trauma like that, it doesn't just have the...immediate physical ramifications on you. For many people it has almost like trauma," she added. "When you re-experience it throughout the years after it, it can trigger patterns in your body of physical distress, so a lot of people suffer from not just emotional and mental pain, but physical pain as a result of being abused, raped, or traumatized in some type of way."

She's encouraging others who have been in similar situations to speak out and is asking the public to be supportive of those who have experienced abuse.

"It's so important to that we take care of them," she said. "The aftermath of this is so magnificent and what I really hope with this song and with our collaboration is that we help people to feel loved after it happens."