Pop icon Madonna has lived an unpredictable and unbelievable life, but before her career took off, she had a very tumultuous start in New York City.

The controversial singer recalls the life-altering times she was held up at gunpoint, raped at age 19 on a rooftop and robbed three times during her first year living in New York.

Madonna shares her overwhelming story in Harper's Bazaar magazine about from growing up in the U.S. Midwest to her marriages and children.

The Big Apple wasn't a sparkly, shining dream; in fact it started out as a nightmare for the outspoken pop star.

"New York wasn't everything I thought it would be. It did not welcome me with open arms," she wrote. "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, and 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."

According to the New York Daily News, Madonna did not report the sex assault to cops, Lucy O'Brien wrote in her 2007 biography, "Madonna: Like an Icon."

Instead, she "internalized" the brutality that left her "crying and shaking on the roof," O'Brien wrote. "Her anger at the attack came out afterward in a need for complete sexual control," O'Brien said. "Sex became a mask, a way of psychologically turning the tables on her attacker."

While she was shaken by the incidents, she was also taken by the colossal, urban landscape.

"The tall buildings and the massive scale of New York took my breath away," she wrote. "The sizzling-hot sidewalks and the noise of the traffic and the electricity of the people rushing by me on the streets was a shock to my neurotransmitters. I felt like I had plugged into another universe. I felt like a warrior plunging my way through the crowds to survive. Blood pumping through my veins, I was poised for survival. I felt alive."

"But I was also scared shitless and freaked out by the smell of piss and vomit everywhere, especially in the entryway of my third-floor walk-up."

Shocked by her surroundings, Madonna kept forging ahead to make her rags to riches story come true.  At the time she was completely out of her element.

"And all the homeless people on the street. This wasn't anything I prepared for in Rochester, Michigan. 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. 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. Sometimes I would play the victim and cry in my shoe box of a bedroom with a window that faced a wall, watching the pigeons shit on my windowsill. And I wondered if it was all worth it, but then I would pull myself together and look at a postcard of Frida Kahlo taped to my wall, and the sight of her mustache consoled me. Because she was an artist who didn't care what people thought. I admired her. She was daring. People gave her a hard time. Life gave her a hard time. If she could do it, then so could I."