Disco legend Gloria Gaynor is known for singing one of the iconic survival anthems of all time – and he or she meant every word.
Just months before recording his classic “I Will Survive” in 1978, Mr. two-time Grammy Award winner she had to beat a catastrophic accident that occurred while she was acting on stage at New York’s Beacon Theatre.
“I fall backwards onto the stage monitor. I stand up, finish the show, went home, went to bed. I woke up the following morning paralyzed from the waist down,” the 79-year-old singer reveals in a latest documentary “Gloria Gaynor: I’ll Survive” which premiered in Tribeca Festival this weekend.
“I used to be in the hospital for 3 months and had my first terrible back surgery there. I didn’t know if I’d ever walk again.”
To make matters worse, while Gaynor was “flat on her back” in the hospital, she received a letter from her record company saying that the label didn’t intend to renew her contract.
![Gloria Gaynor performing in 1975.](https://nypost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/06/NYPICHPDPICT000012596861.jpg?w=1024)
“I assumed it was over,” she says in the documentary.
But even at her lowest point, Gaynor didn’t crumble.
Just months after her near-crippling accident, Gaynor was in the studio with a stiff back, mourning her life over what was about to grow to be her signature song.
And the remaining is history.
“I Will Survive” – which, oddly enough, was originally released because the B-side to Gaynor’s cover of the Righteous Brothers song “To switch” — became her first and only No. 1 hit, and her first and only Grammy Award for Best Disco Recording in 1980.
![Gloria Gaynor and ex-husband Linwood Simon.](https://nypost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/06/NYPICHPDPICT000012598194.jpg?w=1024)
Burnt out after many breakups, this song’s legacy was cemented for eternity when it was chosen to be preserved in National Register of Recordings in 2016
For Gaynor, it was also a really personal hymn of resilience and perseverance as she endured—and survived—every part from poverty and sexual abuse growing as much as her ex-husband’s mismanagement to the disco death that just about killed her profession. .
Born in Newark, New Jersey, Gaynor was raised by her mother in a one-bedroom apartment with five brothers and one sister.
“My youngest brother and I slept in the kitchen,” she recalls.
![Gloria Gaynor w](https://nypost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/06/NYPICHPDPICT000012596714.jpg?w=1024)
But he adds: “We were very, very glad. Children have no idea they’re poor so long as they’re loved.
Despite this, she was traumatized by sexual harassment, first on the age of 12, by her mother’s then-boyfriend.
“One night he got here to my bed and I woke up touching me in a really inappropriate way,” she recalls in the documentary. “At 17, I used to be sexually abused again. He was my boyfriend’s cousin. He bet his money on me and threatened to kill me if I screamed. Nobody would hear me anyway because there was nobody else in the constructing except the 2 of us.”
Gaynor suffered in silence.
![Gloria Gaynor w](https://nypost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/06/NYPICHPDPICT000012596712.jpg?w=1024)
“I never talked about it and I never cried about it,” Gaynor reveals. “Sexual abuse just made me feel unworthy… We internalize all this madness.”
Indeed, it had haunted her for years—even unconsciously. “You already know, you will have these feelings deep inside,” she says. “This stuff touch you in a spot you do not even know and leave scars you are not even aware of.”
In actual fact, Gaynor sees these early abuses as the explanation she accepted years of mistreatment and mismanagement by her ex-husband, Linwood Simon, whom she married in 1979.
These “deep scars,” he says, “allowed these items to occur to me.”
![Gloria Gaynor at the 2023 Tribeca Festival.](https://nypost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/06/NYPICHPDPICT000012446682.jpg?w=1024)
Simon was sending her to work in Europe at breakneck speed while he stayed in the US partying and flirting. Once, when she got here home, it turned out that Simon had put a lock in the basement in order that he could do his private business there. Gaynor and Simon divorced in 2005.
In 2020, Gaynor made a triumphant return under latest management, winning her second Grammy Award for her gospel album “Testimony”. And the brand new documentary is a testament to her survival instinct.
“I’ve definitely been through plenty of things,” she says. “Sometimes our plans work, but sometimes they do not.