Photo: Andrea Raffin / Shutterstock & TikTok
Lady Gaga is has built a persona on being chaotic, and a former friend says she definitely comes by it honestly!
By John Sundholm — Written on May 07, 2023
Nowadays, pop star Lady Gaga, 37, is not just a celebrity but an icon. She's got a roster of hits like "Poker Face," "Just Dance" and "Born This Way" that would make plenty of pop girlies jealous, and a thriving movie career in films like "A Star Is Born" and "House of Gucci" that even garnered her an Oscar for the song "Shallow." Lady Gaga has even feuded with Madonna—and only A-listers get to do that.
Talent is of course the biggest key to Lady Gaga's success, but so is her chaotic approach to her work—it's hard to forget a star who walks a red carpet in a meat dress, after all. And to hear a woman who knew Lady Gaga back in the day tell it, the star comes by that chaos honestly.
A former friend who knew Lady Gaga before she was famous describes her as a 'menace,' 'a nuisance,' and a bad tipper.
Chef, TV personality and TikToker Liv Vasquez recently posted a hilarious video about why she isn't a huge fan of Lady Gaga's nowadays after the absolute chaos she witnessed back when she worked in a New York City bar Gaga frequented in her pre-fame days. "No, I don't know any Lady Gaga songs because Stefani Germanotta," she said, using Gaga's real name, "was a menace to me for, like, a year!"
Vasquez says Lady Gaga's early songs are about a 'dingbat' boyfriend with whom she had a very messy relationship.
Luke, the boyfriend in question, was Vasquez's best friend's roommate and her workout partner, and she says she witnessed a lot of craziness surrounding the pair.
"I had to bring her over to her boyfriend's house every Sunday night, bleeding and throwing up because she was a freaking mess," Vasquez said. "And then she wrote her whole first album about it. Like, I can't care about any of her music because I know it's about this guy."
Vasquez said that Gaga's often bizarre on-stage antics don't surprise her because her real life was so absolutely unhinged back in the day. Things got so volatile between the two that, "Stephanie set her kitchen furniture on fire," Vasquez says. "All this stuff is, like, fine for the stage, but when you see it in real life, it is a nuisance. A nuisance!" Vasquez hilariously insisted.
These antics made Lady Gaga "the villain in our story for a long time," Vasquez said. "It's like, fine for entertainment purposes, but when you have to live with it, it is not cute, I promise you." And it's made her lose any interest in Gaga's hits, especially since so many of the early ones are apparently about her "dingbat" boyfriend who dressed like "a retired Ozzy Osbourne in basketball shorts."
Vasquez says Lady Gaga used to get drunk all day at her bar, never tipped and was constantly injuring herself.
The messiness that was Lady Gaga before she was famous went far, far beyond her "dingbat" boyfriend, however. She says Gaga would come into her bar and get bombed all day long every Sunday.
"Stefani would usually be there just getting fu-king wasted all day Sunday," Vasquez said until she would have to "cut her off and literally carry her across the street home and have my regulars watch the bar."
That was bad enough, but Vasquez went on to not mince words about who Gaga was before she was famous. "Ultimately, she was a privileged white woman who was rich, who never fu-king tipped, who always made me do extra labor, risk my job just to get her out of there, because she was a nuisance." Like a literal nuisance.
And to make matters worse, Gaga was always bleeding everywhere. "Even if we had baby-proofed the bar, she always found something to cut herself on," Vasquez says. "She was always jumping on things and falling off of them, falling off of her stool, falling off of the bar, trying to climb on the bar." She even cut herself on a chair once, Vasquez says.
Vasquez got major backlash from fans for talking about Lady Gaga before she was famous.
Much of Gaga's legion of "Little Monsters" didn't appreciate Vasquez's tale at all. "Ok, so we’re judging someone off of their wild behavior they did when they were 21 years old?" one fan sniped. To which Vasquez simply replied, "Yes." (LOLOLOL.)
But they have a point—most of us are wild messes in our 20s, and Gaga has certainly gone on to do important work, not only as a musician but as an advocate for LGBTQ people. Many people were quick to forgive her. "As a Gaga fan," one user wrote, "This both checks out and endears her to me more lol."
But when it came to Gaga not tipping, even many of her fans weren't willing to forgive her. "Ok- I was gonna say we all had those early [2000s] Lower East Side drunk moments," one person wrote. "But when you said she didn’t tip? Skedaddle Stef."
Several also called out how Gaga tried to cultivate a persona as a struggling, starving artist earlier in her career, despite growing up in a life of privilege on Manhattan's Upper East Side—and this is part of why Vasquez herself is not a fan.
"I was so mad when I found out she was secretly rich and pretending to be poor," she told one fan, "because we fronted her for so much when we didn't have the money."
Thankfully, it seems like Gaga has since cleaned up her act, but it's hard not to love this deeply messy former version of the pop icon. Oh to have been a creature of the Lower East Side in the early 2000s dodging the menace that was Lady Gaga before she was famous!
John Sundholm is a news and entertainment writer who covers pop culture, social justice and human interest topics.