Think Madonna's life is an open book? Not really. Pop icon Madonna is back in headlines - this time for her tragic past.

In a sensational cover story essay for Harper Bazaar, the 55-year-old pop legend recounted an old trauma that pushed her to live a daring life.

Recounting a jaw-dropping incident from her past, long before she shot into stardom, the superstar revealed that she was raped at gunpoint on a rooftop in New York City when she first arrived in the city.

"New York wasn't everything I thought it would be. It did not welcome me with open arms. 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," writes Madonna, who adds that she "had my apartment broken into three times. I don't know why; I had nothing of value after they took my radio the first time."

Arriving in New York, she says, "wasn't anything I prepared for," she writes. "Trying to be a professional dancer, paying my rent by posing nude for art classes, staring at people staring at me naked. Daring them to think of me as anything but a form they were trying to capture with their pencils and charcoal," she continues. (Some of those nudes later made their way into Playboy magazine after Madonna became a star.) "I was defiant. Hell-bent on surviving. On making it. But it was hard and it was lonely, and I had to dare myself every day to keep going."

After several years of struggle, she finally cinched a deal with Sire Records in 1982 and launched her debut single, "Everybody”. And rest is history.

AW: Suchorita Dutta Choudhury