New Musical Express (1995)
Madonna talks frankly and openly for the first time about being raped several years ago.
The one really unsettling image in Sex is the “rape fantasy” in the gym. Were you aware that you had to handle it very carefully, or was it just another photograph?
Madonna looks at me questioningly:
“Where the two schoolboys are attacking me and I’m wearing my Catholic schoolgirl’s uniform?… It was just another fantasy of mine, being overpowered. I have been raped and it’s not an experience I would ever glamorise. But I know that there are alot of women who have that fantasy where they are empowered by two men or a group of me.”
The term “rape fantasy” is an oxymoron anyway. Rape means to take by force, against somebody’s will.
“Exactly. In my photograph it’s obviously completely consensual. Everybody wants to do it. I have a smile on my face because I am having a good time. I suppose it’s not really a rape fantasy if the woman wants to do it. It’s just a case of pretending not to interested when you really are.”
I didn’t know that you’d been raped.
“You’re the first person I’ve ever told.”
Was it a date rape situation, someone you knew?
“No… a complete stranger.”
Did you get help afterwards?
“No. I was very young and I didn’t know anybody. I’d just moved to New York and… It was a very educational experience.”
Madonna grimaces and falls silent.
Would you rather stop talking about this?
“I don’t want to talk about it only in that…” she pauses, choosing her words carefully, “I don’t want to get into this Oprah Winfrey/Sinead O’Connor thing of, ‘Oh everybody, all these horrible things that have happened to me!’ I don’t want to make it an issue. I think that I’ve had what a lot of people would consider to be horrific experiences in my life. But I don’t want people to feel sorry for me because I don’t.”
“It happened a long time ago so over the years I’ve come to terms with it. In a way it was a real eye-opening experience. I’d only lived in New York for a year and I was very young, very trusting of people. I came from the mid-West and I was walking around New York City like everyone was my friend. That experience completely turned me round in terms of becoming much more street smart and much more savvy. It’s that old expression y’know, everything that doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. I was very disturbed about it afterwards but I knew that I couldn’t go back home. There was just no way that I was going back home.”
How could you bear to turn that experience into art? Surely it touched a nerve in you.
“No, because in the photograph it isn’t me being raped. As I said, it was something I wanted. I’m playing the coquette, the virgin or whatever, and they are the bad boys. They take me but only because I give them the opportunity to.”
Madonna stares at me pointedly to make sure that I understand and then prepares to close the subject:
“The thing about what happened to me is that… although it was devastating at the time, I know that it made me a much stronger person in retrospect. It forced me to be a survivor. That’s all there is to it.”
Lähde: Madonna Foorumi
