Singer Lady Gaga has spoken about the emotional and physical anguish she suffered after being raped.

Gaga, 29, first revealed she’d been assaulted last year – seven years after the crime occurred.

She has decided to speak openly about the ordeal after recording a song, Til It Happens to You, for the documentary about campus rape, The Hunting Ground.

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In a TimeTalks panel discussion, Gaga says: “I didn’t tell anyone for I think seven years. I didn’t know how to 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.

“When you go through a trauma like that, it doesn’t just have the immediate physical ramifications.

“For many people it has almost like trauma, where you re-experience it through the years after it.

“It can trigger patterns in your body of physical distress. So a lot of people suffer not just emotional and mental pain, but physical pain as a result of being abused, raped or traumatised in some way.”

Gaga had previously said she refused to let the sexual assault define her.

She told Howard Stern: “I’ll be damned if somebody’s gonna say that every creatively intelligent thing that I ever did is all boiled down to one d—head that did that to me”.