Lady Gaga Confronts College Facebook Group That Said She’d Never Be Famous

Lady Gaga took a look back at her humble roots Wednesday, acknowledging a now-deleted Facebook group created by some of her classmates at New York University titled, “Stefani Germanotta, you will never be famous.” Screenshots of the community, which calls Gaga out by her birth name, have circulated online among fans for several years now.

Gaga confronted the existence of the group publicly by commenting on a TikTok about it. The original post juxtaposed a screenshot of the 12-member Facebook group with a list of the star’s many accolades, including an Academy Award, two Golden Globes, 13 Grammy Awards, 10 Billboard Music Awards and 18 MTV Music Video Awards.

“Some people I went to college [with] made this way back when,” Gaga wrote on the post. “This is why you can’t give up when people doubt you or put you down — gotta keep going.”

Gaga attended New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts in the years before releasing her first studio album “The Fame.” She withdrew from NYU in 2005 and began to perform in New York clubs while developing her stage persona.

Joaquin Phoenix, Gaga and director Todd Phillips recently brought their comic book sequel “Joker: Folie à Deux” to the Venice Film Festival, where the film earned a length standing ovation after its premiere. The film hits theaters on Oct. 4.

“Todd took a very big swing with this whole concept and with the script, giving the sequel to ‘Joker’ this audacity and complexity,” Gaga told Variety in a cover story on the film. “There’s music, there’s dance, it’s a drama, it’s also a courtroom drama, it’s a comedy, it’s happy, it’s sad. It’s a testament to [Todd] as a director, that he would rather be creative than just tell a traditional story of love.”