Demi Lovato said she was raped as a teenager while working for the Disney Channel in the late 2000s by someone who had no consequences when she revealed what happened. The singer does not say who the perpetrator was, but only that she then “had to see the person” all the time.
The remarks were part of a larger story Lovato told in her YouTube documentary Demi Lovato: Dancing with the Devil, which premiered in SXSW on Tuesday, about trauma, addiction and her almost fatal drug dose in July 2018. Lovato ( 28) has long been open about her battle with drug and alcohol addiction and bulimia, including her 2017 YouTube Originals documentary Simply Complicated.
In several interviews filmed during 2020, Lovato described the eating disorder and control by her then-management team in 2018 that contributed to the breach of six years of austerity, and the overdose that plagued her at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. Angeles landed late. weeks. She said she was “left for dead” by her drug dealer after he raped her during the overdose, and that she saw him during a one-time relapse after a stay in a treatment facility in an attempt to regain control. money.
Her return, she said, reflects the experience she had as a teenager. “I lost my virginity in a rape,” she said. “I called that person back a month later and tried to recover by being in control, and I just wanted to make myself feel worse.”
Both times were “re-enactments of textbooks, and I really beat myself up for years, and that was also why I was really hard to compare to the fact that it was a rape when it happened”.
Lovato did not disclose when or where the assault took place, but noted that it was during this time that she “was part of the Disney crowd that publicly said they were waiting until the wedding”, with reference to the purity rings – gems that one’s commitment to waiting for sex until marriage – in the late 2000s temporarily worn by young teenage Disney stars, including Nick and Joe Jonas, Miley Cyrus and Selena Gomez.
Lovato said she wore a purity ring in 2008, when she gained notoriety with the Disney Channel film Camp Rock, which was filmed when she was 15 years old.
Her description of the experience was combined with two interviews from the era: one on a red carpet for the American Music Awards in 2008, the other apparently from the Camp Rock 2 series, in which she said she ‘became more aware’ of just life and people and the way the business works ”since the filming of the first movie. “I think I can protect myself a little more.”
Lovato does not name an offender and describes a consensual experience that became traumatic: ‘We were on the hook, but I said,’ hey, it’s not going on, I’m a virgin and I do not want it that way do not lose. ‘And it did not matter to them, they did it anyway. And I internalized it and told myself it was my fault because I was still going into the room with him, but I was still contacting him. ‘
She said the encounter, and the pressure to maintain an image of purity, at the time contributed to her bulimia and self-harm, and that she struggled to acknowledge it as rape. “The Christian, southern girl in me did not see it that way because sex was not normalized as a child or in the south,” she said. ‘And, you know what, fuck it, I’m just going to say it: my #MeToo story tells that someone did it to me, and they never had any problems with it. They were never taken out of the movie they were in. ”
Lovato did not disclose who she was telling at the time. She said she spoke in public “because everyone who happens to do so should absolutely speak their voice if they can and feel comfortable.”