Lady Gaga seems to be in a great place in her life. She’s newly engaged to Michael Polansky. She’s portraying Harley Quinn in Joker: Folie À Deux, and she’ll supposedly release her seventh studio album in early 2025.
Such a sense of security makes it easier to look back upon tumultuous past experiences and speak out against cruel rumors, which Gaga has done of late.
Last week, Gaga revisited the infamous cyberbully-led Facebook group and commented, “Some people I went to college [with] made this way back when. This is why you can’t give up when people doubt you or put you down — gotta keep going.”
On Tuesday, September 18, What’s Next? The Future With Bill Gates premiered on Netflix, and the second episode features Gaga explaining why she chose not to acknowledge one particularly baseless rumor earlier in her career.
“When I was in my early 20s, there was a rumor that I was a man,” Gaga told Gates roughly halfway into the episode. “I went all over the world. I traveled for tours, for promoting my records, and almost every interview I sat in they said — there was this imagery on the internet that had been doctored. They were like, ‘There’s rumors that you’re a man. What do you have to say about that?’”
After a montage of clips from those cited interviews played, Gaga continued:
“The reason why I didn’t answer the question is because I didn’t feel like a victim with that lie, but I thought about, What about a kid that’s being accused of that that would think that a public figure like me would feel shame? I guess what I’m saying is I’ve been in situations where fixing a rumor was not in the best interest of the well-being of other people. In that case, I tried to be thought-provoking and disruptive in another way. I tried to use the misinformation to create another disruptive point. People, I think, assume that someone like me that performs that my performance is what’s not real, but to me, that’s the most real thing that you’ll see about me. That is so much more real than all of the rumors that are designed to orbit me to gain more clicks.”
Earlier in the episode, Gaga explained the danger of “entertainment and information being a lot closer together than they ever have been before” and explained how “entertainment as a form of manipulation is a big part of my career,” especially in terms of leveraging her platform as an entertainer to advocate for oppressed groups.
Beyond Gaga, Gates used the entire episode to investigate the era of misinformation and conspiracy theories and whether there is any hope of preserving the truth. Other episodes explore artificial intelligence, global warming, income inequality, and infectious diseases.
What’s Next? The Future With Bill Gates is streaming now on Netflix.