According some research, there are up to 250,000 rapes a year in the United States. Today, Madonna reported “one more.” Well, sort of.
The pop icon recently insisted that she felt like she was “raped” when someone leaked her song few years ago before its release date. Madonna’s comments came in a wide-ranging, June 5 interview with the New York Times Magazine where the pop singer talks of her life at sixty years of age, and now after stardom.
After noting how Madonna has been more interested in following her son around as he works to become a professional soccer player, Madonna noted she was hard hit when one of her songs leaked ahead of her 2015 album, “Rebel Heart.”
“She told me she wasn’t yet over the release of her last album,” Vanessa Grigoriadis wrote, “which sold less than her others. The songs had leaked online several months early, far from perfection.”
“There are no words to describe how devastated I was,” Madonna told the writer. “It took me a while to recover and put such a bad taste in my mouth. I wasn’t really interested in making music.”
Then came the admission of just how violated she felt: “I felt raped,” Madonna insisted.
But the Times writer felt uncomfortable with Madonna’s rhetoric.
“It didn’t feel right to explain that women these days were trying not to use that word metaphorically,” Grigoriadis added.
The song leak was not the first time the singer had a problem with the Internet. Only a few years ago she was thoroughly mocked online for posting a semi-nude photo of herself wrapped in a U.S. flag supposedly to celebrate Independence Day.
Madonna has also been involved in other dustups. Last year the “Material Girl” got in a spat with reigning pop queen Lady GaGa when she claimed that GaGa stole an old Madonna quote and made it her own. The “Vogue” singer was also slammed last year for making her appearance at Aretha Franklin’s funeral an excuse to push herself instead of commemorating the gospel icon.
Madonna commonly wades into politics. In 2018 she claimed she moved to Portugal because Donald Trump was elected to the White House. A year earlier she exclaimed that she still has “erotic dreams” about the time she met Barack Obama.
Follow Warner Todd Huston on Twitter @warnerthuston.