Madonna revisits knifepoint rape

>Madonna recalls being raped at knifepoint while trying to make it in New York.

The music icon moved to the Big Apple at the start of her career as a dancer and was regularly the victim of crime.

Now the 55-year-old is reminding fans of how she struggled to make it as an amateur from Rochester, Michigan.

"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," she wrote in America's Harper's Bazaar. "[I] 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."

The star recalled how in 1978 she dropped out of the University of Michigan, where she had a dance scholarship.

But she was unprepared for city life after upping sticks and resorted to stripping down to pay her bills.

"[New York] wasn't anything I prepared for," she penned in the November issue. "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."

Some of the nude images ended up in Playboy magazine after she found fame. But the repercussions of her work were part of Madonna being "hell-bent" on making it to the top.

"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," she shared. "When you're 25, it's a little bit easier to be daring, especially if you are a pop star, because eccentric behavior is expected from you."