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If you thought leaving American Idol was the roughest part of Kara DioGuardi's life, think again. In her new memoir, A Helluva High Note (out on April 26), the songwriter reveals that she was molested as a child and sexually abused again later on in life.
When she was just 11 years old, the star of the new Bravo show Platinum Hit (which premieres May 30) says she was repeatedly violated by a family friend's son who was in his teens. "On one particular day, he took me into the back shed of his house and put his hands all over my breasts and vagina," she writes. "I remember freezing and not knowing what to do."
Unfortunately that wasn't her last negative sexual experience. Later on, as her star in the music biz began to rise, the former Idol judge, 40, says she was date raped by a "fairly known producer."
"Within a few hours, he was on top of me, pumping, sweating, and speaking to me in Spanish, not a word of which I could understand," she recounts in her book.
DioGuardi says she repeatedly told him to stop, but didn't fight him off in fear that he would hurt her. Scared the incident would ruin her career, DioGuardi never told anyone about it.
A few years later, she says she was sexually harassed by a "hugely successful artist," during a three-day songwriting trip. But instead of working, she writes, "the trip's activities consisted of watching Russian porn, scavenging around the kitchen for food (and) leering at two strippers...as they performed sex acts in the living room." Still, she says she continued to work with the artist. "I wasn't gonna let this bastard deter me from doing the job," she writes. Eventually the working relationship ended, after he chased her in his home and touched her inappropriately.
And, if all of these stories aren't enough to make us feel for DioGuardi, her new book recounts her battle to become a mother, while she filmed her final season of Idol.
"I wanted a child and there was no way I could get pregnant under the stress of 18-hour work days and live TV," she writes. "I had undergone three unsuccessful rounds of IVF during season 9."
After learning that there was a shake-up in the works at Idol -- and newbie judge Ellen DeGeneres was headed out after just one season -- DioGuardi asked producers to let her out of her contract.
"Leaving was painful and there will always be a part of me that wanted to stay," she writes. "But my desire to be in control of my destiny was larger than my need to be a household name."
