Diane Warren and Lady Gaga channeled their pain into power.
In the intimate documentary Diane Warren: Relentless, which premiered in theaters on Jan. 10 and will be available for streaming on MasterClass starting Jan. 16, Warren, 68, opens up about a deeply personal experience: her childhood sexual assault.
“I never talked about that I was molested as a kid,” the songwriter says in the documentary. “I didn’t tell my mom or dad at the time.… I didn’t tell anybody.”
MasterClass
Transforming her pain into art, Warren wrote the song “Til It Happens to You” and called on a collaborator who had endured a similar trauma to bring the song to life. “When I wrote the song, I thought I’d heard that Gaga had said something on Howard Stern that she was sexually assaulted,” Warren tells PEOPLE. “And I thought, you know what? I’m going to call her.”
The emotional reaction Gaga, 38, had to the song confirmed to Warren that she had made the right choice. “I call and I go, ‘I want to play you this song. You’re either going to hate me or what.’ I didn’t know how she’d react,” Warren recalls.
“I had the phone down, and I played her the song, and she was hysterically crying on the other end of the phone when I was done playing it. I flew out to New York and taught her the song. We went over it, and then she came back to L.A. and produced this amazing record.”
Promoting the song alongside Gaga brought up unexpected emotions for Warren, as she publicly shared her story for the first time. “I don’t really talk about it, but I was molested by a friend of mine’s dad. I’ve never said that in front of… hardly told anybody, I’m saying this in front of people, wow. I’m gonna stay crying,” she said during a 2015 TimesTalks panel with Gaga, which is featured in the documentary.
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Warren continued, “I never told my friend. And you know, her parents are still alive, but I never said anything. I told my mom, you know, before she passed away, and I said something, and she goes, ‘Why didn’t you tell us?’ and I go, ‘I don’t know’. And I thought about it, and it’s because I felt somewhere it was my fault or something.”
Gaga, who previously shared that she became pregnant after being sexually assaulted as a teenager, sang and produced “Til It Happens to You.” It was so well-received it was nominated for best original song at the 2016 Academy Awards after appearing in The Hunting Ground, a documentary about sexual assault on college campuses.
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“I thought she was the perfect voice to get that song heard,” Warren tells PEOPLE about Gaga, who performed “Til It Happens to You” live at the Oscars. “To me, that performance is still to this day one of the best live performances ever filmed. When she was up there with all those sexual assault survivors, there was so many of ’em on that stage, and she was hitting notes in full voice that I don’t even know how anybody could do.”
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She adds of Gaga’s performance, “She was going places vocally that were almost — I felt like she was exorcising something in herself, too. She was killing her assaulter when she was singing that song that night. If you look at her face. And she’s just such a badass with it. And she just was the right artist for that song. She was the perfect artist for my song.”
Despite the song’s Oscar loss to “Writing’s on the Wall” from the James Bond film Spectre — “That’s the year I thought I was going to win,” the 15-time Oscar nominee admits — Gaga’s performance left her feeling fulfilled. “I have to be honest, I was disappointed in that,” she says. “But I was thinking if only those voters could do their vote after a performance, that performance was so — God, it was just brilliant.”
Diane Warren: Relentless is now playing in select theaters and will stream on MasterClass starting Jan. 16.
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