Demi Lovato said she was raped as a teenager while working for the Disney Channel in the late 2000s by someone who had no repercussions when she revealed what happened. The singer does not say who the aggressor was, only that she “had to see this person all the time” afterwards.
The comments were part of a larger story told by Lovato in his YouTube docuseries Demi Lovato: Dancing with the Devil, which debuted on SXSW on Tuesday, about trauma, addiction and his near-fatal drug overdose in July 2018. Lovato , 28, has long been open about her struggles with drug and alcohol addiction and bulimia, including in her YouTube Originals 2017 documentary, Simply Complicated.
In several interviews filmed throughout 2020, Lovato described the eating disorder and control of his management team in 2018, which contributed to breaking six years of sobriety and the overdose that led to the Cedars-Sinai medical center in Los Angeles for several years. weeks. She said she was “left to die” by her drug dealer after he raped her during the overdose, and that she saw him during a single relapse after a stay at a treatment facility in an effort to maintain control.
His return, she said, mirrored the experience he had as a teenager. “I lost my virginity in a rape,” she said. “I called that person a month later and tried to fix things by being in control, and all I did was just make myself feel worse.”
Both times were “textbook trauma reenactments, and I really fought for years, which is also why I had a hard time accepting the fact that it was a rape when it happened”.
Lovato did not disclose when or where the attack took place, but noted that it was during the time that she was “a part of that Disney crowd that said publicly that they were waiting for the wedding”, referring to the purity rings – jewelry symbolizing commitment expecting sex until marriage – temporarily used in the late 2000s by young Disney stars, including Nick and Joe Jonas, Miley Cyrus and Selena Gomez.
Lovato said she wore a purity ring in 2008, when she reached fame with the Disney Channel Camp Rock film, shot when she was 15 years old. The film and its 2010 sequel co-starred the Jonas Brothers, Meaghan Martin and Alyson Stoner.
Her description of the experience was combined with two interviews at the time: one on the red carpet at the 2008 American Music Awards, the other apparently from the Camp Rock 2 set, in which she said she had become “more aware of just life and life. people and the way the business works ”since filming the first film. “I think I am able to protect myself a little more.”
Lovato did not quote the offender and described a consensual experience that became traumatic: “We were making out, but I said, ‘Hey, it doesn’t go any further, I’m a virgin and I don’t want to lose like that. ‘And it didn’t matter to them, they did it anyway. And I internalized it and told myself it was my fault, because I was still in the room with him, I was still with him. “
She said that the encounter and the pressure to maintain an image of purity contributed to her bulimia and self-mutilation at the time, and that she struggled to recognize it as rape. “The Christian and southern girl in me did not see it that way because sex was not normalized when I was a child or in the south,” she said. “And, you know what, fuck it, I’m just going to say: my #MeToo story is me telling someone that someone did this to me, and she never got in trouble for that. They were never taken from the film they were in. “
Lovato did not reveal to whom she told at the time. She said she was speaking publicly “because everyone to whom this happens must absolutely speak their voice if they can and feel free to do so”.