A clip of Lady Gaga’s axed Do What U Want music video, featuring R Kelly, has leaked. The clip was directed by infamous photographer Terry Richardson and deemed too controversial by Gaga’s team, suffering several delays and eventually not being released at all.

The video was shot in September with a planned release of December in support of the Do What U Want single, the second to be lifted from her number one album ARTPOP, but in January Gaga blamed “bad management” as the reasons for the delay on a post at her Little Monsters community.

In the clip obtained by TMZ, Gaga is on an operating table with R Kelly administering an unnamed medicine that leaves her unconscious. Her lifeless body is then propped up on the operating table by dancers who twerk and grind all over her. Another scene sees Gaga naked yet again save for some newspaper scraps, being photographed by Richardson against a backdrop of scandalous headlines.

While it’s hard to imagine how Gaga would shock us when we are so desensitised by her previous wild antics, it’s easy to see why the entertainer may have decided that releasing a song with the lyrics “Do what you want with my body” with a video directed by an alleged sexual predator and featuring another sexual predator was a bad career move.

In 2002 a video surfaced showing R Kelly having sex with and urinating on an underage girl, while Richardson has been plagued with rumours of coercing his models into performing sexual acts.

The 28 year-old singer has since moved on with a third single from her ARTPOP campaign. The short film-style video for G.U.Y. made the unusual move of featuring three other tracks from the record, Artpop, ManiCure and the originally intended second single Venus.