Madonna is already on the other side of 50. She is one of music's greatest icons. Yet, she can still recall the memory of her struggle in the Big Apple. She also narrates her grueling legal fight to adopt two children in Malawi.

In an interview with Harper's Bazaar, Madonna's survival tale in the Big Apple is like a plot of an 80s movie:

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

"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."

Madonna revealed that the decision to adopt her son David from Malawi was "another daring chapter" in her life and one which threw her back into "another shit storm".

"I was accused of kidnapping, child trafficking, using my celebrity muscle to jump ahead in the line, bribing government officials, witchcraft, you name it," she wrote. "This was an eye-opening experience. A real low point in my life. I could get my head around people giving me a hard time for simulating masturbation onstage or publishing my Sex book, even kissing Britney Spears at an awards show, but trying to save a child's life was not something I thought I would be punished for. Friends tried to cheer me up by telling me to think of it all as labour pains that we all have to go through when we give birth. This was vaguely comforting. In any case, I got through it. I survived."